Andrea Mastrovito 

To make this room I kept in my mind one of the rare pictures portraying Giovanni Testori in his private study. Here the writer used to guard paintings of naked men that he attributed to Courbet and Géricault. In this picture, over the library, you can spot five painting in the background. About four of them we have informations and dimensions, but about the fifth – a man’s trunk above a black man portrait – we don’t know anything. Looking at the picture, I reproduced in their precise original position the four well-known paintings, just by using the material that made up the walls, or layers of paint, the plaster till the cement and bricks, as in the room with the picture of the  whole Testori family. In this work who is talking is the absence: whenever we take off from the wall a picture that has been there for a long time, we realize that on the wall, where the pictures was, a darker silhouette remains, saved from the wear of light and dust. Starting from the idea of that trace left by paintings, I got to imagine that the whole image was imprinted on the wall that, pierced, blended and carved, it eventually gave back the memory it was retaining. Exactly in front of those four carved-in-wall paintings, a plasma TV is proposing a selection of 13 films, all about Art and History of Art, made thanks to Zizi’s (Marco Marcassoli) direction between 2003 and 2006. All these films are a reflection – both critical and not – about Art, its gears, about the History of Art itself and the relationship between artist and work, and they all find here, in that room where Testori used to spend long hours, their natural place. The journey starts from the Haikus – a sort of tableaux vivants or little sketch also about contemporary art claims – to arrive to those 150 plastic tacks to improve your artistic talent where I imagine a number of famous modern artists when they were six years old and give them some plastic tacks to reproduce their most famed works in the simplest forms, to arrive to CH where, with Stefano Arienti and Luca Francesconi as main characters, a museum is stormed – as for Tim Burton Batman – and all of its works are destroyed and defaced in the name of a new and violent ultra futuristic avant-garde.

Andrea Mastrovito

The Band Queen has always been a landmark for everything I did. I discovered them 20 years ago, as almost everybody, when Freddie Mercury died. My high school teacher used to teach us english making us listen Innuendo. For the first time I understood what was said in a song… thus is natural that they often come out in my works. I mean, an artist has to talk through what he knows, feels and loves/hates, in his works, and fairly why we should untie ourself from purely consumerist areas while we are totally surrounded by them? The first video works on Queen born exactly from a meditation about the concept of myth, star and on his possibility of “Technological reproducibility”, paraphrasing Walter Benjamin. So it has been natural to take the band I knew better for having collected its stuff for all the years of my youth. The first step was Sburzum & Zizi Live in Budapest ’86, where, making an accurate assembly and disassembly work of sequenze taken from Queen Live in Budapest ’86, I could make Zizi sing with Freddie Mercury – that, among other things, heralds “tonight, for the first time, we are going to sing a new song, a special one, for you all…” reading the song’s lyric written on his hand – a ballad composed by me and my group, the Madhush, reversing the usual canons for which boy bands are covering more famous bands’ pieces. 

In the two next works, specially in The Freddie Mercury Photocopied Concert, what is being unhinged is the concept itself of originality of the hic and nunc event, of the concert video, of the artist-audience oneway relationship, and all that just by the “photocopied concert”. Photocopying concerts is actually pretty easy: you take the original DVD of the event, you patiently stay in front of your computer and extrapolate every frame where all the musicians appear clearly, the singer, the instruments, etc. At this point, with a photo-retouch program every frame is increased to life size, divided in small, identical sections and printed one by one in (colour) copy format. Now, with the help of scissors and scotch tape, costumes, faces, instruments and microphones of the actual concert’s protagonists are recomposed and, once that they are worn, the concert is reinterpreted, spreading the music playback directly from the original DVD. And everything is recordered by the audience with a variety of channel, from the video camera to the photo camera to the iPhone, exactly like real concerts. The achieved result allows us to break, temporarily live and depending on the shots in the last film, the boundary between facts and fictions, bringing back to life – in the real world – just with some paper, something that is no longer alive, but in analog or digital shots; and at the same time, this result shows the scene fiction’s boundaries, because the photocopies are covering the onlookers only frontally, and so the disbielif’s suspention is never complete and continuous, but it shows the king naked at each movement. Under the television that constantly broadcasts music and video – photocopied – of Queen, there is a piece of furniture containing my CDs and books about this topic, as it was reproducing a young fan’s bedroom, and it serves as link between the two big mirror works on the wall, both made with the same matrix, one by felt-tip pens and the other by collage.  In this pair of photocopies I focus my attention to Freddie Mercury’s histrionic homosexuality, underlining it just using the colours of the rainbow. His way of living homosexuality was deeply different from Testori’s one, who considered it as a sin. Nonetheless Giovanni Testori himself was a big fan of Queen, enough to make Bohemian Rhapsody jangles in all the rooms surrounding his one, in his last days of life, choosing it as viaticum for afterlife. That’s why Queen’s room is exactly located between the room of his youth and the one of his maturity.

Andrea Mastrovito 

This work initially arises from a song, the cover of Soft Cell’s Tainted Love. I refer more to the video then the song, the constellations coming to life, and, as made-of-stars dancers, pushing a guy to leave his home and his insane love. I instantly thought to use the fluorescent stars, the sticky ones that are used in children bedrooms, to get a situation that defuses the Nietzschean emphasis of the work in the next room – 120578, in which I represent myself and the world piercing the sky by grapeshots – and that were a prelude for the following one, genuinely playful by using the pop icon Freddie Mercury in his ’80s style version. Of course the work would have been too light without linking the fluorescent stars with a modest and ancient material, meaningful of opposite meanings, as the carbon paper is, that, matt, it catches and chews lights and colours, swallowing them into the darkness. Thinking of this work and of the powerful contrast between a shiny white and a total black, I figured the image of my mother in the day of her church wedding. Inspite of all the brides she was total black dressed. I remember that when I was a child, every time she was showing to friends the family pictures, I used to ask her why she was dressing like that. “I liked that way” was her answer. So I started to look for one of those pictures, I wanted one of them, where both her and my father were distracted by anything. And I got to find it! You can clearly see both of them (and my grandfather as well) observing and pointing something in the ground. I took them and moved in the wood, at night, where without lights you can’t see in your own hand. And like this is the wood drown in the carbon paper that reproduces in negative the original big pencil drawing (not showed here). Of course, presented in negative, my mother’s dress is lighter than the black of the background: the whitening process is totally achieved on the infront-wall where, lights off (a timer alternates one minute of light and one minute of darkness), you can spot the mirror and shiny images of Anna and Nicola, made by thousands of fluorescent stars. On the ground, in a messy pile, there are other thousands of shiny stars, the only item that you can see whether lights are on or off and directly matched with the two images that otherwise wouldn’t cross: it’s about a love that lasts every day, in spite of everything. And it’s natural, spontaneously adapting to the soil, contrary to the violent vision of love in the opposite room: Rocco (Siffredi) e i suoi fratelli.

Andrea Mastrovito 

This work,expressly made for Casa Testori, has deep roots, in fact it rises from an idea for a lightbox entitled My Birthday that I presented in Ginevra a couple of years ago, during an unfortunate trip with Zizi and Eugenia. The work was representing myself, with a gun in my hand, shooting skyward and thus redrawing, with the back light, the precise position of the constellations that could be seen from Bergamo the 12th May 1978, my birthday. During the several inspections at Casa Testori, I was always pointed out the importance of the big room upstairs, where Testori was conceived, born, where both his parents passed away and where, after his mather’s death, he moved. It seemed natural to me to think to repropose that concept of birth, but extending it to the whole room and at the same time making it global and intimate, through the videoprojection in two separate rooms. In the room next to that big patriarchal room, in the dark, here I am (video projected and animated) repeatedly shooting to the opposite wall, the one next to the big room where, as the shots go on, and thus drawing on the ceiling that precise position of constellations that could – indeed – be seen from Lombardy the day of my birth. This goes well, I thought. But I needed something more, and so I started to plick fleas off young Testori’s pictures, until I looked up the biography and read: Giovanni Testori (Novate Milanese, 12th May 1923 – Milano, 16th March 1993). Astonished, I realized that I no longer have to look for anything, we were born on the same day.

Andrea Mastrovito

In this room are collected three works (two videos and one installation) that continue backwards the walk of Testori family until Testori’s birth, alternating the levels of narration from my story to his one. This is the children room. Appunti per una guerriglia, made just with plastic  tacks for children and with polystyrene, is a clear cross-reference, explicit even in the title and in choice of matierials, to the Arte Povera and its manifesto that Celant posted on Flash Art in novembre of ’67: the tautology is in the children (my grandchildren and one of their friends) who try, digging in the polystyrene, to find other tacks to reenact the “human-nature identification”, the primordial monster with a human skull, to “go back to that limited and ancillary planning, where the human was the centre and the spark of the reaserch, and not its instrument, not its vehicle”. The work was made in 2008 for L’origine delle specie at Biagiotti Art Project in Firenze, and it was completing a seven pieces cycle, all made by plastic tacks on polystyrene. On the wall in front of the installation there is a TV set offering two films with six years of difference between them but sharing the playful revisiting of classic tales for adults. In Nickelodeon, the Tim Burton’s Frankweenie (about a little Frankenstein that revives his dog) is photocopied frame by frame and reassembled by sliding, by hand, all the 10000 photocopies in front of the camera, obtaining again the original movie’s string in which both the assembly and the direction are actually entrusted to the artist’s visible hand. In Bawitdaba two toy animals, a monkey and a pig made by plastic, through a blob movie in which every scene is reconstructed with recycled materials and the sound is exaxctly the one of the original movie, they play the myths of the great cinema, from Dr. Strangelove to Shining, from The Blair Witch Project to Nosferatu and One Flew Over theCuckoo’s Nest, and so on. I always offer this video with heart: it’s the first work I showed in an actual exibition (Italian Boys at Analix Forever, in Geneva) and it was also the first one I sold for my happiness and Zizi’s (the director of the movie) one, because we got 125 euro, each!

Andrea Mastrovito 

Otto sotto un tetto (lit: eight under a roof) is the italian title for the american sit-com Family Matters. Eight members were, indeed, composing Testori family: mother, father, two sons and four doughters. When in the evening you don’t have TV to watch, you get busy! The represented image is taken from a photo, the only one I found with the whole family posing in front of one of the big trees of the house. The work is directly made by carving the wall and thus unearthing, time after time, all the layers of painting, the plasters, the cement and the bricks: I used this technique just once, for The Pindemonte in Geneve. I remember it, it was Christmas. When it’s Christmas I always get new ideas, I don’t know why. I was in the toilet – like Freddie Mercury composing Crazy little thing called love, but he was in the bath, instead I was exactly on the toilet bowl – glancing at a Cuneo’s CesaC catalogue. Suddenly it’s presented in front of me a  picture of William Anastasi’s work. A streak of a wall carved by pickaxes, and all the rubale left there, precisely under the streak, as a god had passed there to engrave the rock with his litte finger. Enlightening, I thought. So I wrote an e-mail to Barbara, who was asking me a new idea for the planned May exibition at Analix. I thought of these figures, these carved-in-wall “guardians” and of their ashes, contained in the polls below. I clearly remember that on those walls had painted a lot of artists, from Julian Opie to Martin Creed, from Matt Collishaw to Alex Cecchetti and Luca Francesconi, from Jessica Diamond until myself, a couple of time, and I thought that gradually, with a crop and a bunch of patience, all the layers of painting could be found, rebuilding the archaeological history of the gallery just by unearthing all those colours. Step by step the idea became concrete and trasformed itself in Pindemonte, a sort of funny danse macabre where eighteen characters, jumping, playing and shagging, they run straightly into death’s arms. And their ashes are contained in eighteen small polls, as a little cemetery of painting. I remember that, for the first time in my life, once I ended the work after having passed sleepless nights scratching tens of square meters with the crop, I cried for the emotion. So here as well, at Casa Testori, I let the wall speak: as they were soaked of photosensitive substances, they give back to us the images of the people who lived here in the passed years, presences that still soak (believe me, I passed a lot of nights in here), kindly, all the twenty rooms.

Andrea Mastrovito 

These collages are heralding good and bad personal memories. Good because, after all, they are the first collages I have made in my life. It was summer, more precisely June of 2003, and I was looking for a solution that would have allowed me to leave the areosol bombs I was using in that period – they were too cold and stiff – and I realized that the solution was exactly in front of me: instead of throwing away the paper masks I used to create my aerosol painting, I tried to use directly those masks, sticking one upon the other. Slowly I started to notice that they were – in formal terms – perfect, and they gave me that freedom that I had always experienced in printing from linocuts or in engraving.  Well, I’d say that the actual starting point for my collages has been Munch’s and Hokusai’s xylography and Picasso’s linoleum, and of course Schifano’s anaemic landscapes and Nolde’s watercolours, concerning informal backgrounds. Since then I’ve always kept on this kind of work through the years, side by side with all the other works, as it was a leitmotiv that flows under everything I do, following here as well Emil Nolde’s example, who made all his very simple watercolour paintings in a lifetime, while his mainstream work was proceding always in different directions. Until today, I modified my collages with passing of time, reinterpreting them white on white, sobstituting paper and glue to tissue paper and pins, reinventing them digging in paperboard or nailing papers on walls, but alway representing a cathartic moment – as for my drawings – where I can stop and make the point of the situation. Ah, as I was saying at the beginning: bad memories. I spent a week, between 3th and 10th June, locked in my home, in my own garage, cutting paper without talking to anybody, barely eating, and I never saw the sunshine for the anger and the annoyance I had. The theme of all these collages, the war, come out from these feelings. It was summer and we had just recided in second league after the famous play-off against Reggina. What a disappointment. Unfortunately I still remember clearly everything, from Natali’s illusive goal to Taibi’s bullshit to all the curses and – overall – the aftermatch fights. Hours and hours of fighting. Those are the base of these collages of mine, that feeling of useless defeat. Of course telling it could seem banal, but try to live it.

Andrea Mastrovito 

Johnny takes hold from Dalton Trumbo novel Johnny got his gun (1939), from the homonymous movie directed by the novel’s autor himself in 1971 and from the piece inspired by it One, recorded by Metallica in their album …And justice for all, and it merges the three languages of literature, music and movies in one single multimedia work, with real actors made of paper and light, made with nothing, like Testori theatre of Gli Scarozzanti. Johnny’s story is simple and terrible: a young american, in the end of the first world war is been sent at the european front where, shot by a grenade, he loses his legs, his arms, his face, his ears and all of his senses but the touch. Considering his state, he is believed incapable of discernment, and he is artificially kept alive year after year just for scientifical reasons, in a small bed in a dark closet. Actually, even if he is unable to communicate, his mind is perfectly awake and aware of the terrible situation, and his thoughts, his fears and his hopes – vain – over the years cross that obscure boundary between life and death, making him unaccepted, the only dead among the alive, the only alive among the dead. I’ve always considered this story as fundamental to me. Certainly because since I was young my family events led me to have a daily realtionship with the deasese. And certainly because I think it could be so extreme, and so unbeareble and so terribly true. Johnny extends his death almost endlessly, living and living again thousands of times the transition from life to death, that passage that none of us could know, the one that in Trumbo’s movie nobody, not even Christ, could understand or just stand. In this frame Johnny seems to me like a Christ armless and legless, who can’t be given not even of a cross – necessary croassroad to the redemption – and thus who can’t be given of salvation. The only relief he can find is around a sweet nurse next to his bedside, to carry him in his endless transition. While I was reading again an interview to Lucia, Testori’s sister, I noticed how necessary was, in this house, to carry oneself beloved towards the afterlife. Testori used to sleep in that bed where his parents passed away, keeping physically alive the flame of their presence. Parents who, right here, in this room where the living/dying Johnny rests in his hospital bed, were presented for the last time to the love of their dear ones. “Now the world is gone, I’m just one”.

Andrea Mastrovito 

While I am walking with Julia through the rooms of Casa Testori, during the first inspection for the exhibition, we find ourselves in the big hall, the biggest room of the house. I check the measures, I make a couple of calculations and I realize that, right there, Johnny is perfectly fitting. So I try to lower the shutters to estimate the darkness’ degree of the room, thinking of the video-projection. As I’m lowering them, I notice a particular drawing created by the extierior light between the holes in the shutter itself. I ask Pietro, who’s right there, what is that, and he explains me that it’s the shadow of the decorated bars in front of the windows. I turn around looking at the three big windows of the apsidal porch, and I immediately picture me plugging some of the shutters’ holes with scotch tape. The principle is easy; is the chinese shadow’s one, the principle of the end of 18 century’s theatre: a shape and a back-projected light. Inquiring about the several room’s function, I find out that was exactly in the porch where the beloved deads’ bodies where brought to the last goodbye: so, on these three big shutters, I portray a Christ’s Deposition and Transport, using as the three crosses, the central wooden axis of the french door and putting in open dialogue this work with the opposite Velazquez’s Crucifixion reported and divided in Johnny’s video-installation. The semantic link between these two works is also enhanced by the itself experience of Johnny the soldier who – as represented down on the right in the installation – is shot and mutileted by a granade while carrying a dead body toward the trench. The ironical title of this work, Easy come, easy go (that it’s actually the title of the whole exhibition), underlines the precariousness of the human condition and even of the divine one, both by representing the empty cross and by the utilized technical support (the half-lowered shutter): as the Saviour arrives, he’s already gone.

Andrea Mastrovito 

Dracula has been accomplished for the first time in 2008 at Nickelodeon’s exibition at Milano’s 1000events: Bram Stoker’s Dracula is among the novels which have had the biggest number of film adaptations, we can count approximately 650 out of it. In this work I show the video-screening of eight movies based on transylvanian Count’s history (from 1922 Murnau’s Nosferatu to Herzog one, up to Coppola Bram Stoker’s Dracula, touching 1931 Tod Browning Universal’s versions and 1958 Terence Fisher’s Hammer) made on book backs of about 60 different editions of the novel itself. This work, besides emphasizing the unavoidable differences of interpretation both at a direction level and at a novel translation one, takes hold from the copyright’s concept about the transposition of any given literary work towards film: indeedNosferatu has been the first acknowledged case of plagiarism made by a director against a novel. Even if Murnau changed the title and the names of the characters, he entirely resumed Stoker’s book plot. The writer’s widow sued the director for plagiarism and she won, forcing the director to destroy the movie. Just by chance a couple of copies has been rescued, allowing us to still admire this masterpiece. This case created a judicial precedent and since then the copyright was enlarged to any film transposition of literary works, too. On the ceiling, Dracula is completed by Chirotteri’s installation, approximately 200 books about bats, cut and fixed with screws side by side. This work clearly takes hold from Enciclopedia dei fiori da giardino and was born in a 2009 October’s night: I was in New York and I was actualizing, with my assistants, the Non ci resta che piangere ship, the installation for the Museum of Art ahd Design. In the night, after having worked for 12/14 hours, I often walked by Strand Books, this huge bookshop beetween 12th street and the Broadway, where every time i used to look for new ideas for new works, and so I ran into this amazing volum exclusively about bats, the kind of stuff I’ve never seen in Italy. Immediately started the idea of covering a whole ceiling with books of that genre. That was the primitive core of The Island of Dr. Mastrovito’s installation at Governors Island in 2010, that besides the bats on the ceiling, it contemplated hundreds of books about butterflies on walls and volums about every animal’s species – life-size represented – on the floor. This room, exactely located where was one of Testori’s libraries, close the cycle of the three rooms books dedicated, room that Testori himself dedicated to books’ and works’ study.