by Giuseppe Fusari.

Sometimes, between the lines of a text, what appears it isn't only what it is said, but, above all – as in the case of Giovanni Testori – the non-said, the supposed, that is the violent human feature, which writing puts into practice and makes it become very striking because of its adherence to life and to existential experience. Thus, writing becomes a way to dominate the shadow, what, in other words, wriggles out of the inside to emerge, to rule over the reason by force.

So, the parable of Testori's art writing becomes almost more striking in its necessity to tell itself than some works, which openly describe his mood. For Testori, the analysis of two distant painters, as Romanino and Moretto are, becomes the only occasion to tell his disagreement, his will of order (this is the usual painting of Moretto) and, on the contrary, his tendency towards the self-destructive rhythm (only his words would have been able to say it so clearly) which characterizes the necessary incorporation of the ego. This is the genius of Romanino.

This is the zone of shadow, or better still, the true shadow of unfathomable which, through the parable of painting and art, is realized as stuttering through the Giovanni Testori's words, hard as stones. Fabio Maria Linari bets himself, that is to succeed in interpreting the shadow of Testori through the rereading of the filled pages of the essay written for the chapel of the Sacrament in the church of St. John the Evangelist in Brescia. In these pages the painting of Romanino and Moretto dissolves in the whirl of the withering solicitations of Testori, fragments, bristles, wriggles out of the bounds with art literature to become the brand of existence.

The intervention of Linari leads to another fragmentation, a further fall into the depth, into the shadow: he isolates some fragments of the painting of Romanino and Moretto, as if they were cinematographic frames and analyses them on the basis of Testori's art writing, reducing them into a mangled outline of the daily human comedy, characterized by simplified, deposed, even better popularized subjects in order to become able to bear the passage of the moment and present.

This is the shadow of Testori (his merciless abstraction of beauty in order to search for its sense) that allows Linari not to let himself mislead by the tempting, aesthetic and outward appearance. Linari counts on the inner man that reveals not only the artistic personality of the two painters, but also their necessary, existencial deviations, the search, the drama of living, the drama of the question that, also if the centuries fly, every man, who lives on the Earth, always asks himself. This is the shadow that reveals negativity, the photographic background of painting that it overwhelms (but doesn't twists it) with its need to give it sense and donates it importance, dening the simply aesthetic superficiality in order to confirm the inevitability of its ethical dimension.

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