Venice, 17 June. (askanews) – A large monograph that reconstructs the career of Armando Testa, with the most famous of his advertising creations, but also a conscious immersion in the strength of his work as an artist who, with hindsight, we can say has often been in ahead of schedule. Ca’ Pesaro in Venice opens its large rooms to the hippopotamus Pippo and the posters that have made the history of popular costume, but also to large murals and obsessive photographs. His wife Gemma De Angelis Testa also curates the exhibition. “Despite the fact that I have followed all of my husband’s exhibitions – she told askanews – every time it is a very strong emotion. This in a particular way because a foreign, English curator, a director of a museum, also worked on it, who in any case brought some something that perhaps wasn’t there in the other exhibitions. A lightness, a freshness, many things. I find the exhibition very moving, so he is there, but he is there today.” Tim Marlow, director of the Design Museum in London, also worked on the curatorship. “It’s Testa’s genius – he told us – he can take something and make a very specific point of it, but it also has a universal resonance. It’s a visual intelligence, a visual poetry. He begins to be an artist as a graphic designer and two things are very connected.” The strongest feeling, despite the historical icons that have entered the collective imagination, is that the exhibition transports the viewer not into the past, but into a present that also looks to the future, from the point of view of practice, as well as social awareness of creative work. Elisabetta Barisoni, director of Ca’ Pesaro: “Absolutely Armando Testa – she explained to us – anticipated the idea that there is no solution of continuity between the disciplines, which for us, I mean us from my generation onwards, is quite obvious This is why Armando Testa is also very popular among young people, who have not experienced him on television, who have not experienced him in advertisements, in jingles, in posters, he has truly brought the idea of the creative, the graphic designer, to another level of dignity advertising”. “He didn’t feel like an advertiser – commented Marlow – he could afford the luxury of ambiguity, and with ambiguity he played with art, but he has always played with advertising too”. And the game works, it is captivating and strange, some rooms are reassuring, others make you more uncomfortable and in this tangle of ambiguity, the Venetian exhibition becomes interesting and alive.
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