Fulvio Testa

nowhere | now here

“Fulvio Testa’s intimate works, usually on paper, such as those in this exhibition, are paradoxically specific and resonant but completely independent of precise reference. They encapsulate his perceptions of the world around him in non-literal ways, at the same time that they embody his continual experimentation with color, touch, and structure.

Testa’s recent watercolors, produced in 2020 and 2021, during a period of isolation at his home in rural Northern Italy, necessitated by the pandemic, and also in New York, are in some ways like a visual diary. The nuanced variations in color, tone, and rhythm of these small, intense paintings, seem like distillations of changes in weather, time of day, and seasons. They result, in part, from the artist’s heightened awareness of the environment during a time of separation from other stimuli and from his reflecting on that situation. Yet these deceptively modest paintings are unequivocally abstract, inflected by Testa’s deep awareness of the art of the past and recent past. however much they are informed by his acute responses to place and experience. They are potent evocations, not replicas or records of things seen. They pulse between near-minimalist purity and fleeting allusion.”

-excerpt from essay by Karen Wilkin