Room 15

The visitor’s memory constitutes the work itself, giving it form and substance. Alone in a dark room, where darkness occupies the space, the call of an intermittent light imposes a movement. The passing of the hours of the day determines the filtering of the sun through the slits in the shutter. The rhythmic flashing triggers a childhood memory, perhaps the flickering of a television set. Turning around, only one’s reflection.

Gian Maria Tosatti was born in 1980 in Rome.

Room 14

The coincidence of the beginning with the end, the idea of cyclicity and the consideration of the end as an inevitable condition for starting again are the premises of Agostino Bergamaschi’s work. There is a very close link between his sculptures: Aspettando il buio I and Aspettando il buio II are two acts of the same script, the poetic description of the arrival of night, which acquires tactile consistency in the sequence of marbles on the point of plummeting and declares its weight, like a guillotine, in the case full of water suspended in the centre of the room, which gradually but inexorably becomes increasingly black.
The narrative dimension becomes explicit in Storia di un colore attratto al centro della terra, in which the title manifests the inseparable relationship between Bergamaschi’s artistic production and the novels on which it is based. Little is left to tell, on the other hand, is a quotation from Italo Calvino.

Agostino Bergamaschi was born in 1990. He lives and works in Milan.

Room 13

Trained at the Dusseldorf School, taught by Hilla and Bernd Becker, whose chair he inherited, Thomas Ruff adopted its methodological rigour, developing an autonomous language through the introduction of colour, photographic manipulation and the use of new technologies. The M.D.P.N. series, produced in 2002, examines the Naples fish market (the letters in the title are, in fact, the initials), a building constructed between 1929 and 1934 to a design by Luigi Cosenza, which became an example of rationalist architecture in the city. This was the same period in which Antonio Cassi Ramelli designed the extension to Casa Testori: the hall, veranda and rooms above it were built in the 1930s.

Thomas Ruff was born in 1958.

Room 12

In the attic of a house once inhabited by an artist, Marco De Sanctis found some canvases prepared by the painter, but not yet painted. Scraping the preparatory layer down to the base, an idea emerges, which unrolls in space, without letting itself be grasped. A linearity that returns as a leitmotif in the artist’s production and that leads from the Tapisserie drawn with meticulous care and patience on paper, taking up the same motif of the carpet sketched on the D’Après Ingres engraving, restored by the artist, to the certificate of authenticity of the precious burin engraving, which De Sanctis has transcribed, in pencil, on the wall of the room.

Marco De Sanctis was born in 1983 in Milan. He lives and works between Italy and Bruxelles.

Room 11

Andrea Bruschi followed the evolution, day after day, of a building site in Via Cosenz 54, Milan, immortalising its slow changes as variations of colour and shape. The initial image was no longer recognisable, only intersections of lines and perspective leaks were visible, bringing his paintings closer to abstraction. The use of lining as a support, instead of the more common canvas, gave the works energy, transparency and luminosity, accentuated by the layers of resin, transforming them into a reflection on light.
February is a sentimental calendar: it is the month in which the artist was invited to participate in Giorni Felici.

Room 10

Anthony Zinonos began calling Gabriella Testori Bernardini only Lella.
He pronounced it with his English accent and with the familiarity of someone who had caressed her black and white photographs for days, who had made other people’s stories his own and had taken part in parties, dinners and trips with his imagination. He would like to have met her personally and laughed with her as he did with his brother Giovanni and would like, one day, to be looked at by a woman as she looked at her husband Carlo.
The family room of Casa Testori hosts a tribute to Giovanni Testori’s younger sister, who died on 2 March 2014, entrusted to the collages of Anthony Zinonos, in which the superimposition of layers of paper enters into dialogue with the subtraction of plaster from the large permanent work by Andrea Mastrovito.

Anthony Zinonos was born in South Africa in 1981. He lives and works in Norwich (UK).

Room 9

Two lovers kiss at night in front of the window of a building in Paris. It looks like a scene from a movie, but it is a fragment of reality that Amedeo Abello has managed to capture with his analogue camera, entering for a moment into the private life of a domestic interior.
His gaze turned outwards, on the other hand, for Photomaton, in which the artist immortalised passers-by in Paris metro stations using photo booths and a mirror tilted at 45°, without being able to control the subject of the shot. The photo booths are portraits of unaware strangers, chosen by chance.

Amedeo Abello was born in 1986. He lives and works in Turin.

Room 8

Dick is a soldier. Sitting on a stool in front of a tent, he is cleaning his boot.
All around, nothingness. Interlude starts precisely from the nothingness and the silence, which, in the setting designed for the exhibition, go beyond the confines of the screen, to continue in the veranda of Casa Testori. A semicircular and rigorous space, ideally placed at the centre of the cardinal points listed by Diego Marcon, in the video entirely sonorised by the artist’s voice. The starting point of the story, divided into three acts of a few seconds, is the preface to Species of Spaces by Georges Perec, in which the slavish description of the details of an environment becomes a condition for grasping its complexity: a paradox with respect to the emptiness in which Dick and the visitor find themselves.

Diego Marcon, 1985.

Room 7

“The relationship that Disler establishes with the visitor is a call and, at the same time, a struggle; an embrace and, at the same time, a torture. This is so true when we try to turn our eyes away to defend ourselves from such a fascinating spiral: in that it calls us and drags us into the suction. Then, slowly, seduced by a pictorial beauty that has few equals today, we begin to understand that, at the bottom of that delirium and that struggle, Disler is also tracing for us the terms of an arcane and mysterious order; that order that survives shattering and chaos; that order that, precisely through signs and colours, performs on itself the extreme and sacrificial proof of its inevitability”.
It was 1987 and Giovanni Testori, reviewing in Corriere della Sera the solo exhibition of the Swiss artist (1949-1996) at the Studio d’Arte Cannaviello in Milan, recognised him as one of the most significant voices of European painting in the 1980s.

Martin Disler (1949-1996).

Room 6

Chiara Briganti has been making her magic boxes since the 1970s and, at over ninety years of age, still assembles microcosms that summarise stories, dreams and obsessions in just a few centimetres. Each little theatre is accompanied by a quotation, which is intended to provide an opening for understanding what is represented and which, on the other hand, sometimes adds to the mystery. The different perspective planes are in fact equivalent to as many levels of reading and interpretation of the works, which are often double-sided, and into which the artist inserts materials from distant sources: stones, glass, and meticulously cut eighteenth and nineteenth-century engravings.

Chiara Briganti (Montpellier, 1921)