TESTI CRITICI
Rosso Pompeiano
di
Franco Testa
Copyright 2007 Franco Testa
TESTI CRITICI
G. Di Genova
G. Gasparri
D. Pierpaoli
C. Melloni
Joan Lluìs Montané
Rosso Pompeiano
Testo Critico
Reflections
on the
"RED POMPEIANO "
With these paintings that belong to his/her more recent works, Franco Testa enters the Domus Pompeiana, but
it doesn't visualize the staving in of it stage and architectural of the villa of Publio Fannio to Boscoreale or the ritual figures of the initiation to the mysteries by Dioniso of the Villa of the Mysteries, the one and the other statuses symbol of the wealthy middle class of the time.
Franco Testa's eye, which appears here as a post-Fellinian interpreter, inasmuch as he does not witness, as in Rome, the sudden disappearance into dust of the ancient wall painting: he's not interested in megalopaintings, he doesn't focus them. He lingers on the skirting of the decorated walls, zooming in from the whole to the lowest particular, that is, both as environmental arrangement
and as portion bearing the decoration as a whole. However, the meaning of the antiquarian museography, albeit risking a fatalistic predestination as Fellini's, remains unaltered - though not paraphrased - for the artist's future memory. The bright Vermilion of these paintings, a less illustrious synonimous of that Peopeian Red which even today is cited as archetype of a chromatism that may, indifferently, celebrate life (Eros) and death (Thanatos) appears stained by neutre spots and deformed by sudden blister-like swellings: a sort of cancer of colour against which the countertone threads that limit the contours of the skirting seem fragile banks.
It is surprising how exploiting the visual memory of a cultural stereotype, such as the decoration of Popeian houses, the artist stimulates our reflection over a number of ethical and aesthetical aspects which, using the identical method of historical and sociological investigation, regard the past and present background.
Carlo Melloni