Exhibition Details

Galleria Continua is pleased to host the exhibition by Armando Testa (1917-1992) entitled Lord Finger in its San Gimignano spaces. The title of the exhibition immediately highlights a strong interest in what the artist has defined as a splendid and exciting architecture: the finger.
The exhibition brings together various works that span from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. Photographs, sculptures, works on paper and canvas, all explore the theme of the finger and its infinite expressive possibilities. The idea that inspired this specific artistic production was to "[…] take one of the most common objects and make something happen to it, transform it in such a way as to remove it from the sphere of automatism and restore its vitality." A provocation and at the same time a creative challenge.
During an interview, when asked why he chose the finger as the subject of his works, Armando Testa replied, "Well, if we want to be banal, because the finger is a graphic element that I have used many times, attached to the hand or detached as a standalone, in many of my advertising drawings. But, upon closer inspection, the reason is another. Because for me the finger also has symbolic value, as well as an anatomical one. The finger is used to point, to specify, and also to touch. The finger is a kind of body in itself within the human body. With fingers, you can make beautiful figures, shadows, even performances. And then, if you really think about it, the idea of the finger did not come to me first. Think of all of surrealism, think of Man Ray, Max Ernst."
We then think of photographs portraying the finger with a bowler hat, among cars like a vigilante, or rising from the ground like a sprout, with clear influences from Dada and Surrealism. Or consider the sculpture Il tempo (translated as 'The Time'), a bronze tree in the shape of a hand whose branches are represented by increasingly smaller hands connected to each other, symbolizing the eternal relationship between humans and the constant search for dialogue. The series Il cerchio si stringe (translated as 'The Circle Tightens') instead plays on the meeting of the thumb and index finger, creating a frame of variable dimensions, a truly lively space on canvas and a privileged observation point.
Often the protagonists are the thumb and the index finger, "The middle finger doesn’t really do much. While the thumb is authoritative, robust, a commander. And the index finger is adventurous in its form and always involved in everything", declares the artist.
Sometimes giants, sometimes clenched in a fist, other times embraced in dances evoking Matissean memory, or anthropomorphized into a part representing the whole, transforming them into human bodies; whether dispersed in a mock photographic process or graffitied white on black, Armando Testa’s fingers unfold and animate in multiple forms, giving life to a comprehensive portrait of mankind.