Fulvio Testa: Recent Watercolors

Testa’s most recent watercolor landscapes are among his boldest, his most spontaneous, and his most uninhibitedly gestural to date. Some of their painterly qualities and their frontality, Testa says, are functions of how the paper he chose responded to paint, but the fundamental character of the works is obviously a reflection of the artist’s intention. Seemingly uncalculated sweeps and stabs of a loaded brush, rhythmic touches, dry or fluent lines, and pools of color, at first encounter, appear to be the result of pure improvisation, the traces of a delighted investigation of the special properties of a fluid, unpredictable medium, teetering on the brink of abstraction. Concentrate on these fragile, seemingly tenuous accumulations of brushmarks and liquid dabs of pigment, however, and they magically become increasingly real , although strangely non-specific. Testa’s “improvisations” start to read as comments on known but not quite identifiable places, like imperfectly remembered regions visited long ago or traveled only in dreams. For anyone who knows the landscape of Northern Italy, Testa’s fleeting, almost-not- there references to hills and dense woods seem oddly familiar, although the open spaces alluded to in other paintings can provoke very different associations. Similarly, Testa’s colors can suggest particular climate zones, times of day, seasons, weather, emotional moods, even qualities of light characteristic of actual places.