The architect and art critic Fernando García Esteban (1917–82) was a well-known intellectual in Montevideo in the 1950s and 1960s. In this article he writes about Alfredo Testoni (1919–2003), who began his career in 1935 working as a photojournalist at several national newspapers (El Pueblo, La Mañana, and El Diario). In the 1940s he was exposed to the visual arts as the photographer for the TTG (Taller Torres García). He brought photography into the sphere of the visual arts, seasoning his virtuosity with constant experimentation. From 1959 to 1962, as a member of the Grupo 8—which included the Uruguayan painters Oscar García Reino (1910–93), Carlos Páez Vilaró (1923–2014), Miguel Ángel Pareja (1908–84), Lincoln Presno (1917–91), and Américo Spósito (1924–2005), as well as the Israeli artist Raúl Pavlovsky (1918–98)—he encouraged the art of the moment, and even experimented with abstraction. According to García Esteban, Testoni felt a strong affinity for the walls surrounding the city of Montevideo. He shot a series of photographs of walls and bas-relief surfaces in cities in Italy, Spain, Germany, the Middle East, Mexico, and Bolivia, amongst others. The images are blowups of fragments of walls that have been worn away by the elements, revealing new facets that bear no resemblance to conventional perceptions but are reminiscent of Arte Otro Español (according to terminology from Cirlot in 1957). Testoni photographs ancient walls that have become cracked and eroded over time. In these series he makes “the invisible” visible through micro-photography in what could be called a “fragment aesthetic.”
[As complementary reading, see in the ICAA digital archive “Aspectos del informalismo. La VI Bienal de São Paulo” (doc. no. 1248560)].