A project by Casa Testori
Casa Testori
Oct. 8-Jan. 21, 2023

Thursday, Oct. 27, 7:15 p.m. exhibition tour with painter Giovanni Frangi
Booking: eventi@casatestori.it

The exhibition with which Casa Testori leads us to the centenary of the birth of Giovanni Testori (1923-1993) is dedicated to his activity as a painter. After all, known as one of the most lively and controversial intellectuals, writers, playwrights and art critics of the 20th century, Testori began his tireless cultural production in the 1940s precisely as a painter, and his first critical writings were born of direct experimentation.

An extraordinary acquisition
The occasion of the exhibition is the Giovanni Testori Association’s recovery of an important nucleus of paintings and drawings that have re-emerged after twenty years of oblivion, works that will allow visitors to discover a previously unpublished Testori. The pictorial production is linked to two precise moments in Testori’s life, separated by a long hiatus away from canvases. If the first nucleus is linked to the years around World War II, between 1942 and 1949, the second, which was ignited at the end of the 1960s, spans the entire 1970s, in a dense succession of experimentation, including technical experimentation.

First floor
Following the thread of chronology, the works are arranged along the walls of the two floors of the house. On the second floor, two rooms are devoted to the 1940s: from the first landscape watercolors to the studies for the Crocifissione of ’49. A surprising succession of paintings, with which Testori participates in the formal research of a generation that must come to terms with Picasso. The room devoted to sunsets on the lake and Teste del Battista marks Testori’s return to depiction: from drawing to watercolor, to the first oils: between 1967 and 1969 thus prepares the revolution of the opening decade, to which the entire floor below is devoted.

Ground floor
From the first room, the 1970s explode, with their incredible bearing of matter: blocks of color in oil that, from the Trittico di Pugili, accompany us into the living room and veranda, in a production all concentrated between 1970 and 1971, coming down from the easel in time to be exhibited at the great exhibition at the Galatea Gallery in Turin, directed by Mario Tazzoli. In Kitchen finds space for a much-needed exploration of drawing and the carnality of the sign, works executed between 1970 and 1974, watched over by his self-portrait. To give an account of new important changes in technique, one encounters the large acrylics, mostly female nudes that are approached only by passing the great fight of the boxers, placed at the foot of the stairs. Concluding the exhibition is the unusual peace of the still lifes of 1977. Still white: the background is spread in watercolor, but spread dense and full-bodied to conceal the crackle of color still beating beneath the surface. Splendor and restlessness, as is always the case in Giovanni Testori’s work.

Forty Realism
The Testori Association preserves the most important nucleus of works created by Testori in his early painting season. A true visual palimpsest of his critical thought, in years in which Italian Realism was at the center of the cultural debate and the painters who felt they belonged to it questioned the suffering of War, the thirst for Freedom, the strength of the everyday and the specter of Picasso, master father to be crossed trying not to succumb. Years in which Testori entrusts his drawings to the GUF magazines for which he was already responsible for art at age 18. As a painter, he cut his teeth on landscape and still life in the bombed and then liberated Milan and wondered about the return of avant-garde painting in churches, arriving at the great Crocifissione, the masterpiece of those years on display in the exhibition and the last work he made before his 20-year abandonment of painting.

All Seventies
In the same decade as the great stagings at the Pier Lombardo Theater with Franco Parenti, Ambleto, Macbetto, and Edipus (1972-1976), Testori threw himself headlong back into painting, with the material oil paintings exhibited at Mario Tazzoli’s Galatea Gallery in Turin (1971), moving on to acrylic with the nudes of women presented at the Galerie Alexander Iolas in Milan (1974) and furiously wielding charcoal for the large anatomical and vegetal studies that troubled audiences at Giorgio Cardazzo’s Galleria del Naviglio in Milan (1975) and at Rome’s Galleria il Gabbiano (1976).  A cavalcade in matter and at the bottom of carnal subjects that was gradually presented in the catalogue by art critics such as Luigi Carluccio and Giuliano Briganti, but also literary ones such as Piero Citati and Cesare Garboli, underlining the interweaving of literature and figuration that was so crucial for Testori.

White Testori
In the exhibition the visitor is called to a total immersion in painting, passing, from vision to vision, to the discovery of thematic assonances, through investigations that exhaust a subject or technique in a few months. Matter is for Testori the painter as for Testori the critic, and even the poet, the heart of his expressive research, which in this exhibition emerges thanks to new protagonists. Thus we discover the central role of white in the experimentation of the 1970s. It is a color that, initially denied by the drafting of large colored backgrounds, later, when the subject is completed, often intervenes to cancel them out. This is what happens in his famous Pugilatori, immersed in a matter-life rendered with blocks of color, from which the figure must emerge by force in order not to sink. It is the same white that, having lost its thickness, becomes a light mist in the acrylics, almost monochrome, of the Nudi feminili ton sur ton, to become tinged with blood red, following the bloody mutilating interventions that characterize the cycle presented by Iolas, for which Testori took care in detail of the setting up right down to the design of the frames. A white that seems negated by the deep black of graphite, laid out with impetuousness in the large papers of the mid-1970s. They are carnal male and female anatomical studies that are associated with plant elements, if possible even more carnal. Papers that appear to be huge photographic negatives with erotic subjects, which of the bodies accentuate, rather than the morbidity of vision, the inexhaustible struggle for survival. It is no coincidence that some of these works were placed at the close of the Milanese exhibition at Palazzo Reale dedicated by Francesco Bonami to the 1970s (2012) and are now at the center of an exhibition dedicated to the heretics of the twentieth century, set up these months at the Mart in Rovereto. The white, hidden by the “negative” of these papers, immediately re-emerges as a protagonist in 1977, called upon once again, as it had been at the beginning of the decade, to cancel out the colored backgrounds, often spread out in bright yellow. A white that returns clumped in watercolor in large backgrounds, imposing theatrical backdrops that allow glimpses of the barely perceptible color beneath them, and from which re-emerge domestic vegetables and flowers, described as archaeological relics cleared from the earth, or plucked animals, as if they were lying on the marble table profusely floured by a cook. A freshness and restlessness, as ancestral as it is domestic, that makes these Nature morte perhaps the most striking works in the Novates exhibition.

Testa di camoscio_1971_olio-su-tela_70x60cm

Fiori rossi_particolare

Castagne_Acqerello_su_cartone_25,5x32

Il piatto di peltro_1971_oliosutela_50x60

1968.OGP.094

Giovanni-Testori-K.O.2-(Boxe-I)-a-1970-olio-su-tela,-cm-200x130

Ragazzo-di-schiena-col-teschio_1970_olio-su-tela_220x150cm

1973.OGP.016

OPENING HOURS
Tuesday – friday: 10 a.m. – 1 p.m.; 2:30 p.m. – 6 p.m.
Saturday: 2:30-7:30 p.m.
Sunday and monday: closed

A project of Casa Testori
Curated by Davide Dall’Ombra
Testori House
October 8 – January 21, 2023
Opening: Oct. 8, 3 p.m., Casa Testori

The exhibition with which Casa Testori leads us to the centenary of the birth of Giovanni Testori (1923-1993) is dedicated to his activity as a painter. After all, known as one of the most lively and controversial intellectuals, writers, playwrights and art critics of the 20th century, Testori began his tireless cultural production in the 1940s precisely as a painter, and his first critical writings were born of direct experimentation.

An extraordinary acquisition
The occasion of the exhibition is the Giovanni Testori Association’s recovery of an important nucleus of paintings and drawings that have re-emerged after twenty years of oblivion, works that will allow visitors to discover a previously unpublished Testori. The pictorial production is linked to two precise moments in Testori’s life, separated by a long hiatus away from canvases. If the first nucleus is linked to the years around World War II, between 1942 and 1949, the second, which was ignited at the end of the 1960s, spans the entire 1970s, in a dense succession of experimentation, including technical experimentation. A core of monumental works, restored for the occasion, will be on display in the exhibition: large, highly textured canvases that have regained their original color, now appreciable in all their expressive force.

Realism Forty
The Testori Association preserves the most important nucleus of works created by Testori in his early painting season. A true visual palimpsest of his critical thought, in years in which Italian Realism was at the center of the cultural debate and the painters who felt they belonged to it questioned the suffering of War, the thirst for Freedom, the strength of the everyday and the specter of Picasso, master father to be crossed trying not to succumb. Years in which Testori entrusts his drawings to the GUF magazines for which he was already responsible for art at age 18. As a painter, he cut his teeth on landscape and still life in the bombed and then liberated Milan and wondered about the return of avant-garde painting in churches, arriving at the great Crucifixion, the masterpiece of those years on display in the exhibition and the last work he made before his 20-year abandonment of painting.

All Seventies
In the same decade as the great stagings at the Pier Lombardo Theater with Franco Parenti, Ambleto, Macbetto, and Edipus (1972-1976), Testori threw himself headlong back into painting, with the material oil paintings exhibited at Mario Tazzoli’s Galatea Gallery in Turin (1971), moving on to acrylics with the nudes of women presented at the Galerie Alexander Iolas in Milan (1974) and furiously wielding charcoal for the large anatomical and vegetal studies that troubled audiences at Giorgio Cardazzo’s Galleria del Naviglio in Milan (1975) and at Rome’s Galleria il Gabbiano (1976). A cavalcade in matter and at the bottom of carnal subjects that was gradually presented in the catalog by art critics such as Luigi Carluccio and Giuliano Briganti, but also literary ones such as Piero Citati and Cesare Garboli, underlining the interweaving of literature and figuration that was so crucial for Testori.

White Testori
In the exhibition the visitor is called to a total immersion in painting, passing, from vision to vision, to the discovery of thematic assonances, through investigations that exhaust a subject or technique in a few months. Matter is for Testori the painter as for Testori the critic, and even the poet, the heart of his expressive research, which in this exhibition emerges thanks to new protagonists.
Thus we discover the central role of white in the experimentation of the 1970s. It is a color that, initially denied by the drafting of large colored backgrounds, later, when the subject is completed, often intervenes to cancel them out. This is what happens in his famous Boxers, immersed in a matter-life rendered with blocks of color, from which the figure must emerge by force in order not to sink. This is the case with the famous Back Nude, Testori’s most challenging work: a large canvas that has entered the Association’s permanent collection on this occasion. A painting of great intensity and poetry, between strength and melancholy. It is the same white that, having lost its thickness, becomes a light mist in the acrylics, almost monochrome, of the ton sur ton Feminine Nudes, to become tinged with blood red, following the bloody mutilating interventions that characterize the cycle presented by Iolas, for which Testori took care of the setting up in detail right down to the design of the frames.

Nature vive
A white that seems negated by the deep black of graphite, laid out with impetuousness in the large papers of the mid-1970s. They are carnal male and female anatomical studies that are associated with plant elements, if possible even more carnal. Papers that appear to be huge photographic negatives with erotic subjects, which of the bodies accentuate, rather than the morbidity of vision, the inexhaustible struggle for survival. It is no coincidence that some of these works were placed at the close of the Milanese exhibition at Palazzo Reale dedicated by Francesco Bonami to the 1970s (2012) and are now at the center of an exhibition dedicated to the heretics of the twentieth century, set up these months at the Mart in Rovereto. The white, hidden by the “negative” of these papers, immediately re-emerges as a protagonist in 1977, called upon to cancel once again, as had happened at the beginning of the decade, the colored backgrounds, often spread out in bright yellow. A white that returns clumped in watercolor in large backgrounds, imposing theatrical backdrops that allow glimpses of the barely perceptible color beneath them, and from which re-emerge domestic vegetables and flowers, described as archaeological relics cleared from the earth, or plucked animals, as if they were lying on the marble table profusely floured by a cook. A freshness and restlessness, as ancestral as it is domestic, that makes these Still lifes perhaps the most striking works in the Novates exhibition.

The papers and the story
The exhibition continues on the second floor of the house, permanently dedicated to Testori, his archive and his Art Library. These are the rooms in which to discover, through works, photographs and unpublished documents, the genesis of Testori’s painting, in its inseparable link with literary production: at the origin of his return to painting at the end of the 1960s, as well as his closing with the Crocifissioni (1981). Thus one discovers the critical writings of the 1940s, so linked to his pictorial expression, the story of Erodiade, at the center of the transition from fountain pen to watercolor, between 1967 and 1969, leading to the first oil painting, and one encounters the faces of the models, the palettes used and the unpublished images from the studio in Via Brera or from the historical exhibitions set up.

Testa di camoscio_1971_olio-su-tela_70x60cm

Fiori rossi_particolare

Castagne_Acqerello_su_cartone_25,5x32

Il piatto di peltro_1971_oliosutela_50x60

1968.OGP.094

Giovanni-Testori-K.O.2-(Boxe-I)-a-1970-olio-su-tela,-cm-200x130

Ragazzo-di-schiena-col-teschio_1970_olio-su-tela_220x150cm

1973.OGP.016

OPENING HOURS

Tuesday-Friday: 10 a.m.-1 p.m.; 2:30-6 p.m.
Saturday: 2:30-7:30 p.m.
Sunday and Monday: closed

Curated by Casa Testori
With the scientific supervision of Elena Pontiggia 
Rimini, Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples 2022, Fiera di Rimini 
August 20-25, 2022 

From August 20 to 25, 2022, at the Rimini Meeting, Casa Testori presented the exhibition “Da Martini a Guttuso. Una piazza per sei protagonisti del ‘900 italiano.”  

How did the great Italian artists bear witness to a passion for man in the dramatic and restless path of the short century? The itinerary proposed by Casa Testori starts from the title of the 2022 edition of the Meeting-“A Passion for Man”-to give a visual representation of it through six great works that document the impetus of an art that managed to stand as a garrison of the human. In a historical season traversed by major ideologies, these artists sometimes start from opposite positions, as in the case of Mario Sironi and Renato Guttuso, one close to Fascism, the other a member of the Communist Party. Yet the differences blur in the consciousness that unites them: the centrality of human presence, with its own aspirations, anxieties and even melancholia. The experience of the twentieth century is marked by the terrible wounds inflicted on the lives of millions of people: it is precisely from this consciousness, assumed in a courageous and radical way, that Leoncillo‘s work is generated, with the series of his “Saint Sebastian.” Marino Marini, on the other hand, in one of his masterpieces, through the leap of the horse that unhorses the rider, gives form to the impetus of the question that burns in the heart of every woman and every man and is the form of the irreducibility of every being. We do not see figures in Titina Maselli‘s great work, which depicts the ride of a subway train: but behind the windows we grasp the poignancy of a thousand presences, grappling with the waits and toils of a very contemporary everyday life. Finally, the great Artuto Martini, in one of the masterpieces of sculpture of the entire 20th century, gives us back the experience that best qualifies the human subject, that of forgiveness, with the embrace between the father and the prodigal son. 

The exhibition was under the scientific supervision of Elena Pontiggia, one of the most important connoisseurs of 20th-century Italian art, and the artists were chosen by Casa Testori from private collectors, institutions and important Italian museums.  

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On Saturday, August 20, Renato Guttuso’s painting “Spes contra Spem” was presented in the presence of Dr. Serena Contini, curator together with Fabio Carapezza Guttuso of the exhibition organized by the City of Varese “The Times of Painting. Chronography of some of Renato Guttuso’s works painted in Velate: the archive of Nino Marcobi” currently underway at Masnago Castle – Varese, and with Davide Dall’Ombra, director of Casa Testori. Click here to watch the video of the meeting.

A project of Casa Testori
Curated by Davide Dall’Ombra
Castello Gamba – Museo d’arte moderna e contemporanea
Châtillon, Valle d’Aosta
22 Giugno – 25 Settembre 2022
Finissage: h. 17, Castello Gamba

L’ultima guerra di Mario Schifano 1988-1998 is the exhibition that the Gamba Castle-Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of the Autonomous Region of Valle d’Aosta devotes to the great protagonist of twentieth-century painting from June 22 to Sept. 25, 2022. The artist (1934-1998) is one of the most important presences in the museum’s permanent collection with Local Heat, Collinare, Per vedere, Orizzontale and Vista interrotta works that are the result of a period of Schifano’s residence in Valle D’Aosta between February and March 1988 and that are presented in the exhibition with a new arrangement in relation to the landscape that inspired them. Schifano worked feverishly in a wing of the former Saint-Bénin priory producing dozens and dozens of paintings, along with works on paper, that were exhibited at the Tour Fromage in the exhibition Mario Schifano. Physical Green, held from April 30 to July 24, 1988.

The exhibition L’ultima guerra di Mario Schifano 1988-1998 – born from a project of Casa Testori, curated by Davide Dall’Ombra and realized by the Autonomous Region of Valle d’Aosta, Department of Cultural Heritage, Tourism, Sports and Commerce – has as its starting point the 1988 Aosta Valley episode and aims to delve into the last extraordinary years of Schifano’s career, until his death in 1998. An unrepeatable decade for the artist: feverish and prolific years, perhaps contradictory, of hand-to-hand struggle with works, of return to painting and of “war” with painting itself, as with his own addictions and obsessions, years marked by the usual and unstoppable creative urgency.

In the beginning was “Chimera”
The major works from the 1980s and 1990s on view in the exhibition are introduced by a video, curated by Casa Testori, that recounts the birth of Chimera, the monumental work created by Schifano during a one-night-only performance in Florence in 1985. A pivotal moment for understanding the force of Schifano’s painterly gesture and the communicative nature of his work, which well explain the climate in which the artist’s willingness to experience his Aosta Valley residency a few years later was born. This is a pivotal episode for understanding Schifano’s confrontation with archaeology, which was fundamental to his training and also central to the Valdostan canvases.

Masterpieces for a look
In the dramatic months that Europe is experiencing today, the war “portraits” in the proper sense that Schifano dedicates to the Gulf crisis seem painfully relevant. It is a period, since the late 1980s, in which the artist is particularly marked by media and multimedia. In years of voluntary confinement in his home-studio, television becomes for him a window on the world and an obsessive source of inspiration. Turning his attention to the main news events of the time, of the war he returns us a personal and poignant look, declined in inescapable works of his path. In the main room dedicated to temporary exhibitions, two monumental works dedicated to the drama of the war in Iraq are presented: Tearful [In lacrime] from 1990, which has become a kind of ideal self-portrait of the artist, and Sorrisi Scomparsi from 1991, the only possible face of the Kuwait tragedy. In Tearful, the drama of war is seen from within the father-son relationship, starting with a photo cut from “Time” of Dec. 10, 1990, where a child looks on in bewilderment as his soldier father, leaving for the front, bows his head covering his face in tears. In Sorrisi Scomparsi, a crowd of new faceless faces overlays the Arabic translation of the work’s title and gives substance to the collective drama of Kuwait.

The pictorial reworking of television images complements the photographic one. Schifano sends dozens of rolls of film a day to print: photos of television screens that accumulate in clusters in his studio and are caught up in a process that is both devouring and germinating.

The exhibition presents four large compositions of framed plexiglass panels (293 x 186 cm each) with more than 1,300 10×15 cm photographs retouched with oil and marker, made in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They are the fruit of the artist’s voracious eye and personality, “I feel like a media…. Through this window [the television set] I capture the images that most strike me, the messages of the dramatic reality that presses upon us. But I am not a passive spectator. As I follow on the video the dizzying succession of events, I think, reflect, create.” An endless production that Emilio Mazzoli called Schifano’s “rosary,” poured out throughout the day at every free opportunity in an attempt to leave an imprint on what was happening around him.

Homage to Emilio Mazzoli
The exhibition was also created with the intention of celebrating the 80th birthday of such a pivotal personality in Schifano’s story as Emilio Mazzoli, one of the most important Italian gallery owners and his passionate supporter in those years. For the occasion, Mazzoli has generously made available to Castello Gamba, thanks to his relationship of collaboration and esteem with Casa Testori, the germinal works by Schifano presented and will exceptionally be on display with his double portrait, never exhibited before, executed by Schifano between 1994 and 1995: CARO EMILIO CONTINUA… (print and mixed media on paper applied on board, 180 x 135 cm each). A tribute to a key figure in postwar Italian artistic culture, capable of grasping the value of the artist in his early days and resolute in supporting and accompanying him, also thanks to the involvement of the most revolutionary critical pens of his time, such as Giovanni Testori and Achille Bonito Oliva.

Schifano among his nature
L’altana del castello is dedicated to the timely reconstruction, through works, documents, images and unpublished testimonies, of the story of Schifano’s residence in Aosta in 1988, thanks to the discovery of an unpublished photographic campaign of the exhibition and beautiful photos of Schifano at work in his studio in Aosta. This pivotal episode was part of a lively cultural moment in the Aosta Valley, with the establishment of the Region’s Exhibitions Office in 1986 and a focus on exhibition activities of an international nature. The energy of patronage and the commitment of art critics such as Janus (Roberto Gianoglio 1927-2020), led, in fact, to the creation of original exhibition events, often with a monographic slant, with a continuous flow of dozens of exhibitions a year, between 1986 and 1995, for more than one hundred in total. Artists were invited to exhibit their work, to share it with the community, and the exhibitions also enabled an important enrichment of the region’s collections. This is documented in the exhibition in the Fabbri “Valle d’Aosta Cultura” series, presented in the Gamba Museum room dedicated to the Valley’s commissions.

From July 2, a series of meetings will open at the Gamba Castle to explore the artist’s work through the interventions of some outstanding critics.

Saturday, July 2, 4:30 p.m.
Guided tour with the curator

Saturday, July 16, 6 p.m.
“Who is Mario Schifano?” Meeting with Francesco Guzzetti

Friday, July 29
6 p.m.: Conversation with Luca Ronchi, official biographer of the artist
9:30 p.m.: Screening of the documentary “Mario Schifano tutto” by Luca Ronchi

Friday, September 23
5 p.m.: Dialogue with Davide Dall’Ombra, curator of the exhibition
On the occasion of the closing of the exhibition, curator Davide Dall’Ombra talks about the most profound aspects of this tireless and multifaceted protagonist of twentieth-century painting.

INFO: 0166 563252
Reservations required, from Sept. 19

ENTRANCE
Fee included in the Museum entrance fee

OPENING HOURS
Daily from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.

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