Kamigami is a magic box that amplifies our perception of space and of what lies beyond our physical limits. It is sculpture that can be seen through the keyhole, from which one can perceive the constructive grid and the recursive structure of a brick multiplying to infinity. Kamigami is a mirage that seems real, it is refraction, the creation of an intimate and magical space that playfully transforms the observer into a voyeur.
Curated by Davide Dall’Ombra Palazzo Bisaccioni, Jesi 12 December 2021 – 27 March 2022
The Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Jesi presents an important anthological exhibition of the work of the American painter William Congdon (1912-1998), an exceptional interpreter of the twentieth century whose painting gave a face to the human quest of the short century, thanks to an anthropological investigation that resulted in paintings of great lyrical power, between the city and man-made nature. The exhibition is a project of the cultural association Casa Testori and presents a collection of works generously made available by the William G. Congdon Foundation – which safeguards the painter’s work – and specially selected by Davide Dall’Ombra, director of Casa Testori. An exhaustive and unexpected journey of more than 30 paintings, often of large dimensions, conceived for the spaces of Palazzo Bisaccioni: from the New Yorks of the 1940s and the Venices loved and collected by Peggy Guggenheim, to the metaphysical landing place of the Campi arati of the 1980s and 1990s. The visitor will be able to move his gaze from the disruptive energy of the American language of Action Painting, of which Congdon was an interpreter, through his early experiences of travelling to his chosen cities. Thus the imposing Rome of the Pantheon‘s vestiges comes to terms with an existential representation of architecture, represented by the chasm of the Colosseo or the precariousness of the city of Assisi, crumbling on the hillside. In the exhibition, Congdon’s “portraiture” of cities is illustrated one after the other by imposing paintings of Istanbul, the Taj Mahal, the human-marked desert of the Sahara and the Santorini chasm. As a counterpoint to the torments and splendours of civilisations, Congdon descends into the minutiae of existence, crossing the metaphor of the animal which, like nature, must come to terms with the violence of man. It is thus that the cycle of the Tori (bulls) becomes a metaphor for the cruel pursuit, expressed in our traditions, as in the pursuit of our own desires. But even a humiliated, wounded and doomed bull can be – writes Congdon – redeemed by the artist, who eternalizes its greatness and power through painting. From painting as redemption to the human symbol of suffering and resurrection par excellence, the Crocifisso (Crucifix), the step is short. However, the American artist’s approach is never aesthetic or theoretical and his approach to the sacred subject only comes after his tormented conversion to Catholicism. The move to the south of Milan focuses his point of view on an almost unique subject: cultivated fields. It is in the last twenty years of his life that the research, from spatial, becomes temporal and the power of the earth and its transformations become the protagonists. These are not idyllic visions: the horizon unfolds over the fields and the human process operated on the surface is followed. It is a torment, also of a material nature, that seems to find peace in the Nebbie (Mists) and the monochromes, culminating in the musical lyricism of the vegetation that concludes the exhibition. Thus, the meditations on George Braque and Nicolas De Staël re-emerge, but above all, the pictorial dialogues with the New York School linked to Betty Parsons’ gallery, which led to the presence of Congdon’s works in the most important American museums and in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. William Congdon is one of the most profound painters of the 20th century, a naturalised Italian but always American in his artistic attitude. Some of the most important international critics have written about him, including: Clement Greenberg, Jacques Maritain, Giulio Carlo Argan, Giovanni Testori, Peter Selz, Fred Licht, and Massimo Cacciari.
At the end of the 1980s, Testori was involved in the city’s debate on the construction of the new cemetery in Novate. It was at this time that he produced some small apocalyptic drawings that foreshadowed the dramatic tenor of the last years of his life, marked by illness. Between 1989 and 1993, Testori was in and out of hospital, but this certainly did not dampen his creative vein which, if anything, received even more energy from his fatigue. Thus, in those years, Testori created numerous writings, often only sketched out, but taken up again until his last days. It was in this context that one of his most important works was born, published posthumously: I Tre Lai.
In June 1991, during a hospitalization at the San Raffaele Hospital, the manuscripts record the preparation of a new collection of short stories, entitled Infera Mediolani and, for the occasion, decorated inscriptions and beautiful drawings reappear among the manuscript pages. The theme dear to Testori’s heart since the 1960s thus returns: a beautiful full-page sunset dates from January 1992, while he was convalescing in Varese, and another of his admissions to the San Raffaele, probably in 1993, is a cycle of eight small sunsets on cardboard. Here the impetuous sea of colour, the forcing of forms, the richness of the drawing and the tessellation of the material are concentrated in a few lines which, ploughing through the white, light up to become lighter.
La pena, mio Cristo, mio re, la pena di Te nel disfarsi di rose sull’onda che calma s’ostende! La pena di Chi mi pretende ed esige totale, imparziale, spogliato d’ogni altra attrazione che non sia la fusione con lei, la Tua fame, con chi non ha pane, con chi non ha spazio né tempo per dare respiro al suo cuore, con chi non ha amore, ma strazio, catene, dolore! Giovanni Testori, Ossa mea, 1983
A cycle of twenty pastels on the theme of the Cross was begun in 1981. The first eight, of a slightly smaller format than the others, can be dated with certainty to 1981, while the remaining ones may have been produced shortly afterwards. Testori, with a small pen drawing, also indicates a possible arrangement of the drawings, it is not known whether for an exhibition or a volume.
«How to decide where they begin and where they end, in these icons that are at once domestic and ritualistic – in these snapshots taken against the backdrop of a memorial duplicity in which the enigmatic solemnity of the biblical sacrifices and the hasty, angry pragmatism of Françoise, the cook at the Recerche, seem to converge, grappling with a “beast” that just won’t die – the domain of horror and that of pity, the province of desire and that of rejection, the domain of condemnation and that of forgiveness? The fact that it is impossible to answer is, I believe, only the confirmation of a complexity that much earlier had been impossible not to intuit and in which the mastery of the sign and the imprint of the masters precipitate, integrating to death – so fraternal, so fatal, these, to become, in a certain sense, even anonymous, to no longer be identifiable, I don’t know, as Courbet or Bacon, but only and in bulk, precisely, as “masters”.» Giovanni Raboni, 1998
In a continuous technical experimentation, with these works Testori puts watercolour to the test, here used dry to the point of being unrecognisable. Where it is not possible to find the animals to be portrayed in a butcher’s shop, Testori’s work is linked to macabre family anecdotes of black cats killed with a rifle and delivered in a sack to the house in time to make unsuspecting doormen faint, guilty of excessive curiosity.
«Today Gèricault continues to be a point of departure for Testori. His lesson and his memory survive the idea of the anatomical fragment abandoned to itself, a mute interweaving of cut legs and arms. But Testori has taken a step further, he no longer needs butchery. There is no longer any need to cut, to chop off legs and arms and then tie them up in a bow, in a still life in night light. It is enough to paint a genital, to obtain the same effect of mutilation. The anatomical and genital fragment itself is enough. […] The surface cracks, leaving open spaces, crater-like voids of light. And in these spaces the light does not break through, but bursts. […] Light is sucked out of nothing, it is only an intervention of darkness. It is darkness that produces it. In this way, together with their luminosity, forms take shape that are not forms but ectoplasms, ghosts of nipples, breasts, vulvas, buttocks, suddenly materialised as if ready to return precipitously on their steps, to dissolve in the darkness of a well. Absurdly plastic images, absurdly fleshy, because there is no distinction between their form and the glow of their ephemeral and astonished light.» Cesare Garboli, 1975
In 1975, Testori exhibited a series of large graphite papers with anatomical subjects and sensual fleshy flowers at the historic Galleria del Naviglio in Milan.
« I believe that few Italian artists bear the stigmata of the “modern artist” like Giovanni Testori. His fatal need to go further and further, farther and farther away, where no one can stay with him: his desperate desire to know sin, damnation, remorse and delirium; and his cold will to construct for himself, day by day, hour by hour, book by book, a tragic destiny, what could be more modern than this? Faced with a will like his, each of us wonders how long they can resist, without giving in or breaking. For my part, I must confess to an admiring aversion. Even if it is naive to write this, I wish that so many energies unleashed to break every limit would gather within the limits that are granted to us. But what is Testori looking for behind the form? Although it seems almost impious to speak of it, he seeks God, whose true name escapes art, as it does every philosophy; and absolute sin, evil without remedy, which are equally unrepresentable with words and their human colours.» Pietro Citati, 1974
In 1974, Testori exhibited at the Galleria Iolas in Milan, run by Alexander Iolas, the great international dealer of Greek origin. He switched from oil to acrylic: in a series of almost monochrome paintings, the material becomes less jagged. The large female figures, on the verge of being swallowed up by the white background, release their strength in the vitality of the blood.
«What happened to Testori was what had already happened to Victor Hugo: writing and drawing at the same time. More precisely, to give birth to word and drawing together, in an intense and dramatic play of different signs, all aimed at making visible the very face of poetry.» Carlo Bo, 1987
The relationship between writing and drawing was always very close for Testori and, leafing through the manuscript notebooks, one discovers that the blank spaces of the pages “hosted” Testori’s expressive vein in a period in which, at least between 1958 and 1964, it did not lead to real paintings or important autonomous drawings. After a few full-page drawings that appeared in the Gilda del Mac Mahon notebook, it was the writing of the poem I Trionfi that prompted the writer to create numerous large drawings, often with a floral theme. On some pages, the size of the drawing and the attention paid to the details of the flowers, clearly portrayed from life, almost seem to reverse the roles, transforming the notebooks into commented herbals. But drawing is also the crossroads of Testori’s theatrical and even cinematographic activity. A cycle of ten drawings bears witness to the work of the writer who, in 1970, for the script of a film never made and dedicated to Hamlet, wanted to design the costumes, with precise indications of colours and materials. In short, drawing proves to be at the heart of Testori’s creative production, whatever expressive path it is destined to take.
«The young naked athletes painted by Testori […], through a long history of cross-breeding, mutations and chromosomal enrichment, descend from Caravaggio’s Bacchino malato or Narciso, placing themselves alongside the young acrobats of Picasso’s pink and blue epoch and with a deeper spiritual affinity alongside Rouault’s clowns and forains, horsewomen and prostitutes, with their almost animal will to fight and ability to resist, to take the blows […]. The beauty of this paintings cannot be grasped inwardly if one does not realise that it represents an act of salvation and gives form to an act of faith in the life of beloved things, things indeed, and to an act of participation in their ineradicable melancholy. These young naked athletes represent the state of innocence of the ragazzi di vita of the Dio di Roserio, of the Fabbricone, of the stories of the Ponte della Ghisolfa, that is, the figures in which they enclose themselves, almost waiting to be born, if a gesture of truth and love frees them from the slime. In the Greece of the golden age, artists performed the same miracle, but without leaving a place for man. The young naked athletes took the form of heroes and gods. A form that for Testori is only hope, or rather melancholy and hunger. His young men remain on earth, this earth, among us. They are nerves and muscles, flesh that can compete and can love and be loved, and yield to fatigue, and fall forgetful in sleep. To die every day.» Luigi Carluccio, 1971
In 1971 Testori exhibited in Turin, at the Galatea Gallery of Mario Tazzoli, the gallery owner who was responsible for the first exhibition of Francis Bacon in Italy and trusted dealer of the Agnelli family.
«In our case, the Baptist’s head has become the object, the symbol, the world of infinite pain and the most desperate despair. Testori took on the part, alongside that of the executioners, of tearing off the Baptist’s head with all its threads, flesh and, above all, blood. In fact, the artist has succeeded so well in this work of dissection and identification that he leaves the spectator in the hands of the artist who becomes a creator, albeit a creator in death. But the album of these drawings also has a divinatory force, in the sense that it is a prelude to what will be Testori’s evolution after 1968, his harrowing descent into hell. Throughout all these years Testori has in some way challenged his and our God, in an attempt to repeat the very story of Creation: he has made himself both actor and victim, master and servant. But always proceeding together, without separating parts and roles: from that sacrificed head he has been able to extract the motion of life, that double register of expectation and defeat that the poet Testori practices with lucidity but also with much obscurity.» Carlo Bo, 1987
In 1968, during the writing of the play Erodiade, Testori drew with a fountain pen a large number of Baptist’s Heads torn by hooks and deformations: nine of them occupied a few pages of the handwritten notebook, letting themselves be framed by the text, while another 72, painted on similar notebooks, formed a numbered series. The following year, he switched from human to animal heads and resumed painting in oils. The cycle of 72 heads was presented at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1987, on the occasion of the staging of the play.
