Coining new names, or new labels, is a complicated business and almost always pointless, Still, it would be worthwhile to find a term for those artistic personalities who manage to be creative in very different fields - not only in painting, architecture and crafts, but in photography, film, television, design - individuals it would be wrong to describe simply as painters, designers or graphic artists. One such personality is Armando Testa, an artist who is endowed with lively and robust painterly qualities but is also among the first to have made skillful use of photography and photomontage. He is, above all, an accomplished creator of images, an inventor of visual paradoxes and, in sum, the person I would like to call a "global visualizer" of relationships between man and the world, production and consumption, "pure" creativity and creativity exercised for a purpose. It would be wrong to think of Testa solely as one of our best graphic designers, but it would likewise be improper to seek to circumscribe him within the highflown category of Great Painters. His encyclopedically vast work - which is hard to sum up in words - is distinguished by the fact that it stands outside all conventions - the extenuated rigorousness of the Swiss graphic tradition, the sublime composure of Anglo-Saxon lettering and the consumerist coarseness of much Italian advertising - and yet can make any of these his own if the job calls for it. Wherefore we find, alongside Testa the highly sophisti...
Coining new names, or new labels, is a complicated business and almost always pointless, Still, it would be worthwhile to find a term for those artistic personalities who manage to be creative in very different fields - not only in painting, architecture and crafts, but in photography, film, television, design - individuals it would be wrong to describe simply as painters, designers or graphic artists. One such personality is Armando Testa, an artist who is endowed with lively and robust painterly qualities but is also among the first to have made skillful use of photography and photomontage. He is, above all, an accomplished creator of images, an inventor of visual paradoxes and, in sum, the person I would like to call a "global visualizer" of relationships between man and the world, production and consumption, "pure" creativity and creativity exercised for a purpose. It would be wrong to think of Testa solely as one of our best graphic designers, but it would likewise be improper to seek to circumscribe him within the highflown category of Great Painters. His encyclopedically vast work - which is hard to sum up in words - is distinguished by the fact that it stands outside all conventions - the extenuated rigorousness of the Swiss graphic tradition, the sublime composure of Anglo-Saxon lettering and the consumerist coarseness of much Italian advertising - and yet can make any of these his own if the job calls for it. Wherefore we find, alongside Testa the highly sophisticated "conceptual artist" who amuses himself concocting visual metaphores for his Christmas greetings, another Testa, the prolific producer f public posters that are instantly accepted and understood by the masses (and often spiced with a skillful dash of kitsch), and finally a Testa who is a modern painter, a master of up-to-date techniques and at the same time the successful executor of broad-stroke chromatic canvases, who, if he hadn't had to devote so much time and energy to other fields, would probably be recognized as one of the most accomplished producers of pictures on the borderline between naturalism and abstraction, and perhaps, too, as one of the few Italian practitioners of the art that lies between action painting and abstract expressionism. I have perhaps used the term "abstract" a bit hastily. It should rather be taken as a point of departure for viewing and interpreting Armando Testa's artistic environment. If we go back in time, to one of the artist's first graphic works, we find an advertisement for ICI, dated as long ago as 1937, consisting of a geometric shape pointed and folded back on itself so as to present a surface in more than one plane, a concept which would surely have pleased the artists of Swiss Konkrete Kunst (concrete art) movement such as Bill, Lohse or Huber. Here, then, is a very early instance of attachment on Testa's part to geometric abstraction and concrete painting. But Testa's talent was certainly not going to let itself be bound by formal pictorial systems of this kind. In his posters for the XVII Olympics (1959) he was already beginning to integrate photography with drawing (or painting) in a way that was to dominate his graphic production for decades, with such stunningly skillful results as - to cite just a few examples – the Pirelli Elephant of 1954•, the Stilla Collyrium poster of 1968 and the series of billboards for Citterio of 1974-76. I cannot trace here, step by step, the innumerable stages of Testa's development as a commercial artist and advertising man. I shall only mention his advertising campaigns for Baratti & Milano, for Carpano, for Café Paulista, for Saiwa, or for Simmenthal ... and that poster - now famous enough to make it a classic, not just in Italy but throughout the world – for the Carpano's Punt e Mes. Testa has made far-reaching use of photography, of photomontage, of images combined with written words, but also of pictorial additions and even, as in the splendid serigraph of the Owl, of the combination of drawing, painting and photographic insertions (motor-car headlights in piace of the eyes) and even - in thc Café Paulista series (Caballero and Carmencita) and the Pippo disposable diapers series - of three-dimensional moving images for TV. In any case, personal preferences aside, I would like to repeat once again that Testa - whether he be considered a painter, a commercial artist or a global visualizer (the one description, perhaps, that truly fits him) – remains one of the most genuine expressive forces in Italy, in his unflagging determination to communicate to his neighbor - both the "big neighbor" of mass media and the "little neighbor" or the cultural elite - his complex and ever-intriguing visual message at once persuasive and artistic.
Armando Testa: Global visualizer - by Gillo Dorfles
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