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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.