22/07/2024

H.E: To what extent would you say contemporary advertising has the power to point the ‘lord finger’ at us so we may do or buy `the right thing`? Or, do you think that advertising in the 20th century was much more powerful because of the great minds behind it?

G.D.A.T: These are two completely different types of advertising: contemporary advertising is a sort of technological refinement of the previous one without, however, possessing its originality and inventiveness. By changing the medium of advertising, the way of interacting with the public has also changed. From a social mass phenomenon, the result of a long process of stylistic and market research, of which the poster was the medium of choice, we have come to see advertisements that are aesthetically very refined but lack the originality and irony that made them memorable. Undoubtedly, today's advertising is more pervasive and tailor-made, focusing on the "click of a mouse" but paradoxically with poorer visual and textual content.

Armando Testa was a pillar of Italian advertising; he brought his artistic vision into this world, synthesizing the figurative and the abstract, creating forms with unforgettable strength. He invented television campaigns whose slogans have entered the collective imagination, for example, the much-quoted phrase from the Lavazza carousel "Carmencita sei già mia, chiudi il gas e vieni via" (Carmencita, you are already mine, turn off the gas and come away) or the one pronounced by a seductive Solvi Stubing in the middle of the desert "Chiamami Peroni, sarò la tua birra" (Call me Peroni, I'll be your beer). Armando loved to astonish the eye, surprise the heart, entertain the mind, and he almost always succeeded.

H.E: Italian is perhaps the most prominent language of hand gestures. Many thoughts and feelings can be signified without speech. Hands and fingers have been central to art since the dawn of Christian religion (and before, in Judaism and long before, in Ancient Egypt as the Mano Pantea - Hand of the All Goddess - amulet depicting two fingers representing Isis and Osiris, and the thumb their child, Horus; or the hamsa, the hand of Fatima in the Muslim world), the iconography of Christ Pantocrator following on to themes of the hand of God in late antique and early medieval periods. Some of the most renowned examples extend from The Last Supper by Da Vinci, The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo, Doubting Thomas by Caravaggio through to more modern times in the works of artists such as German portrait and documentary photographer August Sander, or most famously Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs of Georgia O’Keefe’s hands, and later movements such as Dadaism and Pop-art. The concept of hands and fingers made by hands and fingers carries forth such a unique perspective on our creativity as humans. Hands that create, hands that destroy, hands that pray, hands that yearn and hands in-between, idle and romantic, and the final result, hands that are created by hands. Do you think that as the human race we will one day exhaust that source of inspiration and ingenuity?

G.D.A.T: Hands are a universal symbol, our connection between the intellectual world and the physical world. They are the means through which we grasp the world and allow us to make tangible what has so far remained confined to the space of the mind. The gesture as a manifestation of thought could make us think of hands as an infinite source of inspiration and ingenuity. However, art evolves in harmony with new technological and scientific discoveries. Artificial intelligence, in its tendency to distance us from the body and its real sensations, will affect the way we relate to hands, but I am sure it will be a means to explore other boundaries and find new sources of inspiration. Who knows how androids will paint! "Art is eternal, but it cannot be immortal. [...] It will remain eternal as a gesture, but will die as a material," as stated in the First Spatial Manifesto back in 1946; and I believe that this concept can be emphasized with force now more than ever.

H.E: How do you explain the contemporary endurance of Armando Testa’s work? The work of a man who worked in typography until his early twenties and later went on to become the king of advertising in Italy during some of the country’s hardest years both politically and socially… To this day, his artwork feels so contemporary and “alive”, naïve yet full of dark humour in our new world of AI. What do you think he would have thought about the contemporary technological advances? 

G.D.A.T: Armando was a pioneer of multidisciplinary creativity: he expressed himself through a variety of mediums, achieving excellent results in any field he engaged with, from painting to drawing, sculpture, architecture, photography, and television. His permanently creative style led him to develop a process of fusion and synthesis between art, commerce, entertainment, and design. He succeeded in bringing his artistic vision into the world of advertising, creating advertising works whose visual and conceptual aura matches that of the finest artworks. For example, I think of the minimalist work of the Punt e Mes poster, where word and image merge and identify with each other, offering us a piece of pure visual power. Similarly, his latest series of works on the cross embodies a universal idea, where the body of Christ becomes the structure and vice versa. This is an absolutely brilliant symbiosis between meaning and signifier, between container and content, which I believe is a key point of all his work. As Michelangelo Pistoletto, who was Armando's student at the graphic advertising school in Turin, stated, "One thing I understood immediately from the example of his personal work: the importance of the essential, the strength of the essential image. And there was all the modernity extracted from the ancient, an immense depth of the history of forms exploding in the absolute precision of an icon of the present, the icon of the product, the icon of a new religion." Armando's works can be compared to icons, therefore they are timeless.

H.E: Do you collect works by digital artists? And do you think Armando Testa would have made digital art had he been alive now?

G.D.A.T: I don't collect digital art pieces, and I don't believe Armando would either, but I'm sure he would have delved into digital art, being as curious about the new as he was. In a conference in the 1980s, he had already stated: "The world we live in is a world of images, which will become increasingly intense, where the public will play by juxtaposing and reliving them in multiple ways. This is the future of mankind, which is bombarded by images... and it will be a new game also because man will have rapidity of connections and exchanges within the images." With thirty years of foresight and the absolute sensitivity and vision that distinguish great geniuses, he understood how the production and circulation of images would play an increasingly fundamental role in the relationships between people and in defining our reality.