He loved synthesis: “In less there is more”, Armando Testa often repeated, quoting Mies van der Rohe, architect and designer. The ‘less’ from which to start was that of simple and elementary signs, a circle, a cone, a diagonal, but he also needed the ‘more’, the stroke of genius, to make them become something else, visions, characters or even icons . The ‘most’ of him were his imagination, his humor and above all his modernity: it is thanks to these special ‘pencils’ that the works of Armando Testa (1917-1992), and above all his advertising creations, entered the imagination collective and continue to surprise us. And he, who defined himself as “abstract by instinct”, became one of the greatest communicators of the 20th century.
“Thirty years in advance Armando had understood how images would acquire an increasingly fundamental role in the relationships between people and in the definition of our reality”, underlines his wife Gemma De Angelis Testa, an appreciated collector, who together with Tim Marlow, director of the Design Museum in London, and Elisabetta Barisoni, head of the Gallery of Modern Art in Venice, curated the exhibition which until 15 September at Ca’ Pesaro reconstructs the path of that “global visualizer” (in the words of Gillo Dorfles) who he is considered one of the fathers of advertising, “even if I – Testa laughed – would prefer to be his brother-in-law, or son-in-law. Or rather I would prefer to be an idiot, but 18 years old”.
Armando Testa was born a typographer at the Vigliardi Paravia school in his native Turin, with the teachings of Ezio D’Errico, director of Graphicus. And so he fell in love with the essentiality of the sign: his first project for a poster, created at the age of twenty for a paint industry, combined two triangles in primary colors and a white quadrilateral.
He went to the war in Africa with a backpack full of magazines and sketchbooks, and upon returning to Italy, in 1946, his creative talent flourished: the first posters for Riccadonna and Asti Gancia, then in the 1950s the funny series by Re Carpano, the posters for Facis and Borsalino, and the Punt e Mes logo, a red sphere with a half sphere, an idea born by observing a Japanese doll “which inspired him to introduce three-dimensionality into drawing”, adds the wife.
In 1956 the graphic studio became an advertising agency. And in ’57, when Carosello arrived on TV, commercials blossomed from the drawing. The mysterious Caballero and the beautiful Carmencita of the Paulista café were pure cones, without arms and hands, yet “in the boundless pampa” they also managed to shoot, and the alien Papalla of Philco was a sphere with eyes. Then Pippo, the Lines hippopotamus, created in 1966: every ‘boomer’ today has loved him madly. Testa continued to develop his effectively ‘synthetic’ style in poster design: “A poster is always an idea”, he explained. He created the Pirelli elephant with a tire instead of a head, the little man from the Digestivo Antonetto, an extraordinary embrace of full and empty spaces, and also various civil campaigns, for Amnesty, for the Red Cross or against the abolition of the law on divorce. He was so ‘forward’ that his poster for the 1960 Rome Olympics (a torchbearer with the Colosseum as its body) won the selection but was considered too modern: Testa then proposed a Capital which was chosen as the image of the Games. His eclectic research crossed genres, combined apparently distant figures, played with food and animals, overturned plans with irresistible irreverence: examples are the “Lemon bulb”, the “Energy bag”, a sandwich stuffed with electric cables and transistor, or the “Ham Armchair” which was also published in Life in 1981.
The Venetian exhibition also offers us an overview of Armando Testa as an artist and painter: on canvas he could allow himself to be totally ambiguous, without the need to think about the product. Until in the final room we arrive at the “Sign” of signs, the Cross, which Testa faced in 1990: the upper part, inclined to the left, recalls the reclining head of the dead Christ, “once again a destabilizing and evocative gesture”, Marlow observes. Brilliant, even in the farewell section.
