The Artistic DNA

The retrospective thus outlines the profile of a multifaceted and visionary artist, able to keep an extraordinary expressive power in every field of his research - from advertising to painting, photography, television, and sculpture.
A volume will be published to accompany the exhibition, bringing together, for the first time, texts by the most authoritative scholars who have written on Testa—from Gillo Dorfles to Germano Celant.

“Whenever a journalist asked him to tell the story of his life, Armando would reply, ‘I was born poor, but modern.’ It was not simply a witty line, but something profoundly true. ‘Being born poor is a misfortune, but the worst kind of poverty, in my view, is the kind that denies you culture,’ he would say.”

“The exhibition All the ‘Isms’ of Armando Testa is a monument to creativity.”

“His attention to the various “isms” reflects an understanding of his own time that draws broadly on forms of expression inhabiting the specific realm of art as an absolute form.”

“Armando Testa’s world was rich in stimuli.
As with all major figures in culture and art, it is possible to identify a conceptual thread that binds together and shapes his inventive journey. That thread is visual research, whether applied to commercial communication, painterly representation or the exploration of three-dimensional objects.”

“Testa’s Surrealism stages, in a sense, the comedy of everyday life. It is a Surrealism that merges with the Commedia dell’Arte. It is not driven by sinister impulses or psychological dysfunction; it is a joyful, childlike Surrealism that delights in the absurdity of the everyday. The success of many of his best-known campaigns lies precisely in that adult ability to revel in a childlike mixture of astonishment and wonder.”

“Testa’s work creates a kind of “spontaneous” exchange between advertising and the consumer, as it succeeds in making an “inhuman” reality accessible to a mass audience. He does not use the image for its detached, contemplative quality, but as energy and vital flow, which — by asserting itself as “phenomenon” — breaks through the surface of poster and screen.”

“The painter and the advertising man. Two very different creative identities which, in my father, coexist simultaneously and within the same person in an unusual yet fascinating way. I never cease to be amazed by his ability to move from one to the other, drawing nourishment from both while keeping them rigorously separate. I believe this is his true strength.”

“We begin to understand something of Testa and why he paints: not simply to be an “artist”, but to express what has never been expressed, perhaps not even to himself. Some people speak, others paint; and for some, painting is also a way of speaking.”

“The distinctive quality of his work — encyclopaedic in scope and difficult to sum up in words — lies precisely in its ability to exist outside every established framework: beyond the exhausted rigour of Swiss graphic design, beyond the sublime composure of Anglo-Saxon lettering, beyond the consumerist crudity of much Italian advertising, yet capable of making each of these different categories its own whenever the work requires it.”

“Testa offers us a series of painterly interpretations of the finger which, in their breadth, variety and rigour, provide yet another rare demonstration that authentic and inexhaustible “high creative tension” can draw new inventions — or at least new images and signs — from virtually any pretext. For professional painters, this challenge from an advertising man and painter is almost an affront: a slap in the face, indeed “a finger in the eye”, announcing a duel.”

“From his earliest campaigns, Testa applied “sprezzatura”, isolating a single element of cultural sophistication and placing it within an immediately accessible communicative context. Testa always called this ability “synthesis”: the capacity of his campaigns to evoke an idea, a concept, a philosophy instantly and with striking economy.”

“His is a painting in which the mark itself clearly reveals the primary structure of Neo-Cubism, an Expressionist graphic gesture and, at the same time, a reference to American Abstract Expressionism. This wholly unusual and, above all, profoundly new combination makes Testa’s painting a “hapax legomenon” — something expressed for the first time in our culture.”

The Poster Museum at Wilanów is the world’s longest-standing museum devoted to posters. Opened in 1968, just four years later it dedicated a solo exhibition to Armando Testa.