Room 7
Invited by Andrea Mastrovito

The relationship between Mario Schifano and the Modenese art dealer Emilio Mazzoli has been fundamental for both of them since the 1980s. The 700 photos that were presented were taken from the personal collection of the gallery owner, who bought several thousand from Schifano. The famous photos taken on television, printed and repainted, fully express the artist’s poetics and pictorial practice in the last decade of his life: his passion for the media and his visual bulimia. As his historic secretary, Renzo Colombo, recalls: “He spent a lot of time working on the photographs he took on television, which he then cut out and coloured. With the photos Mario detached himself from everything and everyone. For a while he used up twenty rolls of film a day – I used to take twenty rolls a day to the print shop! He would say: “This is now the real quality work, not the pictures”.
As his friend Roberto Ortensi, long-time assistant to gallery owner Ileana Sonnabend, points out: “Everything started with images photographed on television, often out of focus or with strange blue flashes, figures that evoke an elsewhere, something else, on which he would sometimes intervene with colour. When he intervened he did so almost as a tribute to painting, they were like signs, a sort of reminder.

Photo retouching was a fast, yet mysterious occupation. He was able to bring out an unseen, unperceived intensity and depth from the images. It was like the work of a diviner. He would revisit with paint the images of reality that came into his home from the television. For a while, these photos would remain on the work table, stacked and divided into genres”.Mazzoli concludes: “As you know, Mario was not interested in the sacred, but for me his work was a bit like a religion and reminded me of cloistered nuns who always pray to achieve ataraxia. He did the same, he worked all the time, or drew or painted, his work was like a form of purification. Of course, he had this secularism of wanting everything and everything now. But these photos were his rosary: he always had a bunch of them at hand and while he was talking to you or on the phone he would paint on them, crumpling them up one after the other”.

Mario Schifano was born in Homs (Libya) in 1934. He died in Roma in 1998.

Room 6
Invited by Adrian Paci

When I entered Casa Testori, I felt as if I were visiting many small intimate microcosms connected by very narrow doors. In my room I perceived this privacy as if I could project my image in all points.
What is family if not this. The collection of all the emotional projections of the members, enclosed in intimacy in a small macrocosm.
The same parental relationship creates many small microcosms of their own being.
We children are parents and unique individuals at the same time; we grow up believing that we will be different and we explore the world relying only on ourselves, but what are we if not a microcosm derived from the union of two macrocosms?
We all come from a mother and a father, we are all the result of two different genes.
So the question arises: why shouldn’t we children simply be a continuation of a fluid, the passing of the baton of something sensory that changes as a body passes through different languages of expression?
I work on my family for this very reason: I am a microcosm that looks into their world and I unhinge that glass bell built for an educational hierarchy by transforming myself into parent and child at the same time. I act on my father and mother because I want to break the glass of the bell in which I am reflected.

Daniela Peracchi was born in Alzano Lombardo (BG) in 1990. She lives and studies in Milan.

Room 5
Invited by Enzo Cucchi

A story? No. No stories, never again.
What happens to the Thing when it is said? Does it live? Does it die?
Is it possible to imagine an open form that overcomes the inadequacy of language in defining the real, pronouncing but at the same time keeping alive without destroying?
My research explores pictorially the linguistic limits of the sayable. The signs I use are not representative, they document a time, a reality. The images are not the narration of an event, but the event itself. The viewer has the task or the possibility of constructing his own personal vision.
The project for Casa Testori is an attempt to generate a Mystery through the alternation of light and darkness, of gravity and grace.

Caterina Silva was born in Rome in 1983.

Room 4
Invited by Turi Simeti

My three works exhibited at Casa Testori moved in the territory of visions, on the inability to perceive forms in their reality, they are therefore works on loss, on disappearance.
The sculpture Macula placed on the floor recalled the shape of a place, alluding to an elongated architecture, to the “ships” of Cattolica. It is sacred, walled in, mysterious, unreachable.
The work Casamatta, from the photographic series exhibited in Amsterdam, is the stage of a journey in search of places through the web, it is the trace of an immaterial journey where photography tries to capture the image without the experience of looking directly at reality, architecture is only evoked.The third work, Ora incerta, had as its subject an architecture that is reduced to a citation of itself, unable to emerge on the surface. It remained suspended and ambiguous under a veil that obscured its vision.

Angleo Barone was born in Modica (RG) in 1957. He lives and works in Milan.

Room 3
Invited by Massimo Kaufmann

“Images of broken light,
which dance before me like a million eyes,
that call me on and on across the universe”

My work is instinctive, and it’s emotional. I never know what will come out. I want to be surprised. I want the image to surpass me and I find myself wondering where it comes from and what it is. Making a painting is like taking a long walk, without knowing where I am going and always choosing unknown paths, often losing myself in the dark corners of my mind and finding myself a moment later illuminated by the nervous lights of hurrying cars. We proceed to a point, a point at which I realise that the work is working. That point is always mysterious and reaching it is a source of enormous satisfaction. One step later I too am a spectator (never objective), I often find in a painting the different emotions experienced. Painting is an emotional experience. The painting is a concentration of energy, often uncontrollable.The title is taken from the song Across the Universe by The Beatles, although I got the idea from listening to the beautiful cover by Laibach. The song is called a cosmic ballad. I like the idea that an emotion can be personal, universal and also cosmic. I like works of art that have this tendency, even if only in the artist’s head. Even when representing fragments it is important to always remember that all things in the universe are connected. Nikola Tesla said: “Everything that lives is linked in a deep and wonderful relationship: man and the stars, the amoeba and the sun, our heart and the circulation of an infinite number of worlds”.

Branko Jankovic was born in Belgrade in1978. He lives and works in Milan.

Room 2
Invited by Julia Krahn

For my entry into Giovanni Testori’s house, I wanted to bring just two works, which speak of me and of him. This Eroe belongs to a cycle on which I have been working in recent years and which starts from Heinrich Wolfflin’s book, Come fotografare le sculture. The intention is to work with repainted paper on classical statuary; thanks to the medium of photography, the statue becomes a painting and this allows me to bring it closer. Often the museum setting does not do justice to the work, it makes it elusive, it prevents me from having the overall view that is necessary to really see it. Painting tries to respond to this need, summarising all the necessary points of view and releasing the force that the work wishes to express.

For the second image I thought of Testori, of his being a tragic poet, and this is the first time I have worked in a serious, serene and thoughtful way on the human skull. Unlike what usually happens, I did not start from the page of a book, but had a photo taken ad hoc that had the composition, strength and shadow that I had in mind. It is a work that takes me back, to my training, when I painted architecture characterised by dark holes, by these relationships between dark and light. I looked to my beloved Bellotto and his shadows, where images emerge powerfully through absent areas, through cavities. In this case it is a human skull and, as with the animal skulls, it is my privileged relationship with black that dominates. As in the writing, the colours are reduced to a minimum, because what dominates are the colours of absence: the shades of grey, the lunar colours that lead almost to monochrome, to grisaille. The board is a medium I never use, but it also takes me back to my early work, when I painted on upturned masonite and found wood. And then I always work on the themes of time and memory, which is why I love materials that have had their own history and that bear a trace of it.

Luca Pignatelli was born in 1962 in Milano, where he lives and works.

Room 1
Invited by Leonora Hamill

I find myself experimenting and searching for Form and Matter through sculpture.
I have an epidermic affinity with materials such as sheet metal and barrels, materials that are rough, heavy and not very malleable. Today, even in sculpture, I choose iron. The reason for this choice lies in the simple fact that I work with the intention of bringing out its lightness from an element considered ‘heavy’. The emotional power that it conveys just by looking at it, through the rust itself and the nuances that come from it, creates a sort of addiction… It is a continuous discovery.
With the sculptures I wanted to work on thickness and depth, playing with the balance and dynamism of shapes, of the same material, with simple superimpositions, using very linear elements. I wanted to work on the more hidden aspects of the material itself, such as lightness and linearity. By reducing the size of the sculptures, with a play on depth and chiaroscuro and horizontal cuts, I tried to find light. A light that gives a sense of lightness to a sculpture that is in itself physically “heavy”. It is precisely by welding the finely cut sheets at a calculated distance that I am able to find and allow the light to filter through. A light that emerges through the material and that gives a sense of “discovery” to those who see it.
Often, working on a project that I have already established, I am guided from one form to another in an instinctive but not random way. This is how I end up creating a work (in this case a sculpture) that starts with an idea and ends up comprising a set of my attitudes and feelings that I then try to convey to my interlocutor.The final product is an imposing and elegant object despite the choice of material, iron, colour, rust, the imperfection of the material and the welding points left in some of the works, which underline the manual work.

Mary Pola was born in 1975 in Tempio Pausania (OT). She lives and works in Foligno.

Room 22

Placing the body inside the soul and not vice versa.
Not the work in the room but the room within the work, an interweaving of depth and surface, an osmotic exchange between the visceral and the atmospheric.
Freeing up openings, in the hope that the work can accommodate the vestiges of this epiphany.
An indecipherable language leaks out from the silent walls, and the work becomes an ear, a shell caressed by the foam on the sand.
Time is an anointing that gushes and dries.
Touch time with your eyes, the silence hanging on the walls.
The image must breathe with them, become a mysterious threshold.
In the breath there is something that continually returns and vanishes, an anadiomena movement that suggests and does not show.
What remains hidden is greater than what is exhibited.
Breath knows no distinction between external and internal, between mine and yours, between individual and universal.
In the breath there is contagion, crossing, oozing, interstitial humour between the skin of the work and the clothes of the room.
Six works to preserve and reveal what cannot be shown.
There are only remains, small survivals that the work attempts to trace.
A living heart warms the whites, and the surface turns out to be a receptacle of expectation and desire.
Ettore Frani

Frani’s poetics confirm itself above all as a poetics of the veil and of waiting. He knows how to interrogate the surface of the canvas and the surface of the world because he can see the depth that is implicit in it. It is in the surface that the painting and the world are given. But, as Nietzsche said, it would be completely naive to think that the surface is superficial in itself, that is, opposed to the true being of the world, as a transient and secondary part compared to the substantial centrality of the essence. No, Frani works on the surface, placing in the surface the mystery of the world, its unlimited contingency.
His whites are the result of multiple, meticulous, lyrical and, at the same time, insistent and dogged layers of colour. The peace he achieves at the end of the work is obtained through tenacious work. His white is by no means a starting point. He does not start from the surface, but reaches it. His whites are thus always populated by spots, shadows, presences, small incisions, imperceptible excavations, discontinuous densities on a background that is only apparently homogeneous. His monochrome effort revolves in a privileged way around the oscillation of absence into presence and vice versa. Frani constructs his whites through painting and in this construction elevates the surface to the dignity of a mystery.
The veil does not cover the essence, it does not conceal the mystery, it does not hide the world. The veil is the world; there is no world without the veil. The mystery of the world is one with the mystery of the veil.
Massimo Recalcati

Ettore Frani was born in Termoli (CB) in 1978. He lives and works in Rome.

Room 21

Wunderkammer (Chamber of Wonders) is an expression from the German language, used to refer to particular rooms where, from the 16th to the 18th century, collectors used to keep collections of extraordinary objects. In a way they can be considered as the embryonic stage of contemporary museums. All objects of wonder were closely linked to the idea of private ownership: this stimulated the growth and spread of collecting. The aim of the collector was to get hold of extraordinary objects found in nature (naturalia) or created by man (artificialia). More generally, these objects were called mirabilia, things capable of arousing admiration and amazement.
With this new chapter I wanted to create a room that would contain, and in some way narrate, the wonder and amazement that I feel when I listen to the noises behind my work.
Every gesture I make, every creative process, brings with it a sonic consequence, an unconscious rhythm that comes to influence and inspire my thinking.
This multitude of sounds, a translation of the force applied to the material, composes in my head an infinite series of melodies that I have been obsessively trying to record and document for some time.
Because to fully understand the relationship between a sculptor and his material, it is essential to listen to their soundtrack.
Corrado Abate

Corrado Abate works on wood as if in a dialogue with an alter ego: he listens, observes, assimilates everything the material has to say in order to then intervene and express its intimate essence. For the artist, the act of creating is an almost alchemical and experimental process that uses the principles of chemistry and physics to interpret intrinsic realities. The splits, burns and penetrations are actions inflicted on a material that is still alive, which therefore reacts and metabolises over time, bearing its marks. The violent physical effort of Abate’s intervention on the wood as an entity other than itself reveals itself as a form of self-harm: an attempt to perceive its own existence and to seek a balance. One thus senses an intense and profound bond between the artist and the works: each is the story of a close relationship, an osmosis that imprints a strong energy on the material and conveys the sensation of a connection with the All.
Maddalena Tibertelli de Pisis

Corrado Abate was born in 1977 in Biella, where he lives and works.

Room 20

How is it that a fifty-year-old ‘madman’ starts graffitiing at Casa Testori? Why is he presenting us with a work from the last millennium?
The exhibition here would like to open up to the younger generations, to highlight their work. What does this graffiti suggest to us, which is not really graffiti at all, given that it is a quotation of a graffiti, moreover “cinematographic”, and therefore fictitious in origin… A quotation of a quotation therefore… And yet in every passage indexed… F.F. Coppola quotes with that graffiti, the character’s sign, the being against par excellence, and in the film he decrees its end, or crisis, and as its only existential development he posits a poetic act, destined to result in death. Beyond F.F. Coppola’s tragic vision, The Motorcycle Boy is an insane, anarchic figure, and thanks to his impossibility of adaptation, due to his “sensitivity”, the only one still capable of communicating us a truth, beyond any mediation.
From these observations, 15 years ago the desire to quote him was born, and now in this context, aimed precisely at the new generation and in the deep darkness of the new era, I hope it can say what it is and what I hope art always wants to be, and that is to say invention for a possible world, perhaps better than this one, where, as in the Motorcycle Boy’s dream, the fighting fish in the ocean can live in peace, because they each have enough space for their own needs.
Mario Airò

Each of his [Airò’s] works discreetly affirms that there is a possibility of seeing the world with new eyes, of living one’s own experience by cultivating an expectation of the world.
Gianni Romano

Mario Airò was born in Pavia in 1961. He lives and works in Genoa.