PERIODI ARTISTICI
Rosso Pompeiano
di
Franco Testa
Copyright 2007 Franco Testa
Rosso Pompeiano
I was mentioning a play of hide-and-seek between form and colour since it appears obvious that there's no marked predominance of one over the other in the Artist's project. There is, rather, a reciprocal chasing along the paths of a phenomenology which, as Husserl suggests, consists in epoche (Greek, for "a cessation"), i.e., a suspension of judgment of the true nature of reality in order to focus on the essence of matter. It's a visual process - visionary if you like - that trespasses into optical magic as sometimes happens when the form/colour route is cut off and the painting is no longer such, inasmuch as consisting simply in the total emerging of the irregular chalk mounting, just like the plaster of a wall corrupted by century-old moulds that have covered the pigmented film. In such case, the persistance on the retina of previously captured film.In such case, the persistance on the retina of previously captured images fills the unexpected whiteness of omologous iconographies. Among others, I, too, have written in the past that the most obvious cultural reference of this Artist from Ascoli
are what is left of the mural paintings of Pompei after the disastrous earthquake of the year 62 a.C. and the even more disastrous eruption of the Vesuvius, seventeen years later, that buried buildings and inhabitants under a thick layer of ashes and lapilli. He who has seen the wall paintings that survive in the "Villa of Misteries", in the "House of the Vettiis" or the "House of Menander" - only to mention a few - will be able to spot in Franco Testa's painting the inspiring motif, a sort of feedback undoubtedly linked to the memory but enriched by the sensitivity of the Artist to extrapolate from the historicized context a whole range of working conjectures, fragmented into pictorial microcosms (the finishing touch of a wall skirting, a human anatomy detail, a laurel twig, etc.) from which the Artist extracts the essence of things I mentioned above. And then, the prevailing red colour. The "Pompeian red" par excellence, that covers the background and spreads in the chromatic definitions of superimposed images, that is, a colour which in history of art has become a stylistic parametre - so much so that it was used and abused by architects of the neo-classic period to bestow on their work a touch of classicism.
In the interpretation of the Artist from Ascoli, the red colour acts as the container of a series of iconic findings that his expressionistic stimulus suggests to him. For him, too, this red is shocking but - quite differently to the anonymous painters of Pompeii that were busy to delect the rich Roman customers' "otium", Franco Testa seems inclined to isolate the examples of a visual culture that was, all in, unconventional and pleasure-loving, wrapped in the cellophane of idolatric ritualism - without glorifying them but, rather, stressing the damage done by time and by catastrophic natural events.