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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”.

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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.

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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: indeed Nosferatu 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.

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In my work I’ve often resorted to photocopy. After I had photocopied the whole Analix Forever gallery in 2007, the very next year I found myself in New York, at the Italian Academy at Columbia University. They had in here a wonderful (aesthetically) library, huge, warm, comfortable: it invited you to lie down on big couches and read books all day long, if only all the volumes weren’t disposed randomly and an index or a catalogation weren’t missing. All that because, as it seems, the whole Italian Academy’s big books collection was been sold (I think to the Columbia) and the italian Government had thought only after many years to send tens of boxes containing thousands of loose books, from the litterature ones to the art history ones. Disposed like that, the volumes looked actually beautiful and new (some of them were still wrapped up, but they were basically unusable. I’ve been really impressed by the concept of “frontside”, were the book became a piece of furnishing (the fact that the libraries of the Academy were empty, back in time, it had sicken several Columbia’s professors, that notice them while taking a walk on the Amsterdam Avenue), and because of that I decided to create by myself the books index, just by photocopying the whole library, volum after volum, and re-installing the photocopies on the actual books. In the meantime, to facilitate the usage of the new photocopied library, I binded two different copies of all the approximately 1360 images used in two big catalogues of two volumes each. The metonymy as far achieved, the container for the content (the library INSIDE the books), allowed the visitator to leaf quickly through every back of the library’s books and find thus, in an easier way, the wanted volum.
The idea of rebuilding this “travelling” library at Casa Testori starts from here: the original images’ files are been readapted to the measures of the room that was Giovanni Testori and his nephews’ studio, and these files cover now the walls simulating  the presence of books and shelves. The fact that this library is, for its own nature and from the beginning, easy come, easy go, makes it especially suitable to the walls of Casa Testori, where Giovanni used to have his real library, or his collection’s pictures that, after having been studied and eviscerated, they were straightaway replaced with new paintings by different authors.

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I got the idea of these “gardens of books” in a two years ago evening, while I was arranging the studio. Zizi, my fraternal brother, came to ask me to make, at once, necessarily, a little work for a girl he had to seduce, a dancer. So, after an ungentle discussion, to make it fast, I decided to take one of the Degas’ books I had on my shelves. I open the book on a riproduction of two ballerinas and I cut them on three of their four sides, letting them attacked to the page by their feet. Once they were bent perpendicular to the page, seen from the side, they seem actually dancing on the book. Zizi grabbed the volum, he gave it to the dancer, and thanks to the power of Art, they are now living together in a nice house next to the Serio river. Reaching the Enciclopedia dei fiori da giardino was an easy step from there: I noticed the naturalness and the immediacy of that work, but I needed something to give it strenght and verity. So I thought of flowers: strenght, because from the flower arises the fruit, from the fruit the tree, from the tree the paper and from the paper the book, that in my work was coming back as a flower, closing the circle going back to the starting point of the cycle. Verity because flowers on handbooks are usually in 1:1 scale, in their real dimensions, thus likely to see. In Casa Testori I show this flowerbed reproducing the exact shape of the trompe l’oeil painted on the ceiling above, becoming itslef a trompe l’oeil. Specular to the fresco also in the placement of the doves between flowers, the flowerbed find its raison d’être in its central heart, represented by the “pampurzini”, the cyclamens, the flowers that Giovanni Testori used to prefer, he that, after a heavy nervous breakdown, painted them in a famous ten-small-paintings cycle that he gave to his familiy, as a gratitude sign for having been next to him during that desease.

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I accomplished this 26 portraits series in two sessions. 22 in 2007 summer, the other 4 in 2009 spring, these last for 2009 fall/winter Kris Van Assche’s advertising campaign (and here i drew myself much more hotter, besides I had to look like a model – pretty tough matter). At the beginning they just should be little reverse “fioretti”, inverting the topic of  Franciscan “fioretti” (one of the first drawings is actually mocking Giotto’s Sermon to the Birds, replacing birds with paper planes), or rather little meaningless – but at the same time – essential miracles: biting a shark in open sea, scaring Count Dracula, drawing the sun in the sky, planting flower books in the ground… But more and more that the work was progressing, I realized that I was dealing, actually, with an handbook, drown in Hokusai’s mangas style: a survival handbook for artists, an interpreting key of reality that allowed me to create a link between the ideas I had and what I wanted to do. So, a lot of these drawings, between 2007 and 2009, became a starting point for a lot of big installations, from Eine Symphonie des Grauens to Robespierre, from The Origin od the species to several collages to arrive to Enciclopaedia of Garden Flowers that is inspired by the drawing where, tearing pages from a botany book, I saw them in the ground, waiting for them to grow. In this exibition, for the first time, these 26 drawings are shown to the audience: I think this is an important viaticum for the exibition. Being disposed in the two room next to the entrance, they discreetly invite the public to enter in touch with my most secret and intimate world, showing all the things that are at the base of my last years work, following Testori’s method, according to wich he used to sorround himself of all the paintings he found of a given artist and, then, understanding the life, the desires and the passions just through his painting, his (de)sign.

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TORNA ALLA PIANTINA

Gesù di Bergamo nasce nell’estate del 2010, quando i ragazzi di Cantieri d’Arte di Viterbo mi chiedono un progetto per un libro d’artisti a più mani, Drawing a New Memory, in cui ad ogni artista viene chiesto di rileggere il passato reinventandolo. È da tempo che cerco un pretesto per mettere su carta un vecchio progetto, ovvero la stesura di una sceneggiatura per un film sul ritrovamento del corpo di Cristo.
Ricordo bene che già nel 2007 ero andato apposta a Chi vuol esser Milionario per racimolare quei 300-500 mila euro necessari ad avviare la produzione del film, e a dire il vero ce la stavo anche facendo, sparando risposte a caso, quando Gerry Scotti mi fece sbagliare la domanda da 70.000 euro. Maledizione…
Questa l’idea iniziale, poi si sa, quando si comincia a scrivere, come diceva Verga, il romanzo sembra che si scriva da solo. E così è venuto fuori questo Gesù di Bergamo, che per metà è storia vera, per metà è rilettura – compendiata e scanzonata – dei Vangeli, le cui vicende sono riadattate, per l’occasione, invece che in Palestina, nella ridente città di Bergamo, proponendo un modus operandi già caro a Testori il quale riscrisse l’Amleto, il Macbeth e l’Edipo Re riambientandoli nelle terre a lui care della provincia milanese.
La stanza con le 500 copie di Gesù di Bergamo – disponibili, gratuitamente, al pubblico – si pone all’inizio del percorso ideale del primo piano: come noto, la fede religiosa era il principio fondante attorno al quale si formò il nucleo famigliare dei Testori, e da qui parte il piccolo ciclo di cinque stanze ad esso dedicate.