Italy – Artist
Ttozoi
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Name artworks
Genius Loci
Laboratory slides or … works of art?
Overall, the format that catalogs the works of TTozoi artists in the form of photographic proofs, leaves room for error. Painting and bacterial cultivation, on a support, add up molds, stains and natural oxidations. The mini-images of a pictorial mosaic, seen in this way, grouped neatly on the blank page, archive from the gallery, look more like scientific slides than painted pictures. Because here painting is the extreme technical counterpoint of the gesture.
Imperfect, because accidental, is TTozoi’s work, emotional and fantastic. The TTozo make the canvas no longer a simple support, but a real living matter, ground, on which they create the “environment” for painting. An unusual painting, a humus, on which temporal agents play the rest, making an intervention only provoked by the artist thrive. Here is the only real gesture: sprinkle the support with organic matter – water, flour – which over time and under certain conditions, forced into sealed cases, generates “MOLD”. Molds able to shape their own aesthetics beyond the borders and the will of the artist himself. A creative, sensational, magical alchemy in the final product, which modulates and detects the geography of the painting, rather than writing its history. Their intervention void is also and above all an “Intervention on the Void”. The artistic gesture is canceled but Nature, normally annihilated, is given back its primordial creative value. Ttozoi’s painting assigns an aesthetic task to organic nature, that is, an artist’s task. It asks life (mold) to “show itself” in the form of a painting. One could think of TTozoi who works on the painting for six days (biblical times, but not so far from organic rhythms) and on the seventh he waits for the painting to happen. Or not. Free will.
… and why glasses?
In the wake of tradition, God on the seventh day does not stop creating, but simply shifts the axis of interest of creation from the world to himself. He transforms it from a generator of life to a spectator of that same life… yes! Spectator of a vital and livable environment that we all occupy in time and space, just like the “chosen people” of bacteria “which, like any other pictorial element, have shape, surface, color, density and…. autonomous life.
Everything, therefore, takes shape through that gaze: attentive, pleased; LOOK then “A nothing with space” that – since then – everyone filters through the eyes suggesting volumes, colors…. Matter; to amplify its hypothetical dimension and the potential for existence.
Year
2020
Genius Loci #01
Genius Loci #02
Biography
Stefano Forgione (Avellino, 1969) and Giuseppe Rossi (Naples, 1972) are the artistic duo operating under the pseudonym TTOZOI since 2010, the year of the personal exhibition in Naples at Castel Dell’Ovo (curated by Luca Beatrice). Stefano (Degree in Architecture) and Giuseppe (Degree in Economics) are both self-taught. Since adolescence they experimented with various artistic techniques (charcoal, ink, watercolor, acrylic, oil, spray, collage …) and approached the history of art of an informal matrix, supporting their aesthetic and conceptual vocation.
Story
In December 2006 it will be the common passion for the Informal to bring the two together, after years spent in various cities in Italy. At the center of their confrontation is the development of a project – based on “concept” and “form”, “time” and “matter” – which is becoming the mouthpiece of a small revolution in the experimental field of painting. TTOZOI is the creator of the so-called “intervention void”, a real waiting, following the simultaneous four-handed action on the canvas, during which Nature – in its flowering among the textures of the canvas in the form of mold – becomes pure linguistic code. A new grammar – alive – that from the moment the molds are blocked, makes the material imprint on the work a definitive sign, a beginning that leads to the consequent epilogue, generating a new surface capable of metabolizing metaphor and mimetic similarity. GENIUS LOCI, conceived by Stefano Forgione and Giuseppe Rossi, under the care of Gianluca Marziani, was born from the idea of creating works of art directly in the chosen historical places, through their technique based on the natural proliferation of molds on jute. The project is developed with the patronage of MiBACT – General Directorate of Museums – and the Archaeological Complex of Pompeii – Ambulacra of the Roman Amphitheatre has already been built at the Royal Palace of Caserta The artists create the works in situ: the informal process, carried out by four hands, involves the use of organic materials (various flours), water and natural pigments on jute canvases. They then implement a dedicated “Art Area”, made up of several installations of sealed display cases, inside which the canvases are placed and left to dwell for about 40 days. Time and Nature do the rest, favouring the conditions for the natural proliferation of molds on the canvas, with always different manifestations, as conditioned by the specific external variables of the place of execution. The spores interact with the work initiated by the artists – conquering the space granted by them – following an instinct for survival, feeding only on the organic part. TTOZOI monitors the progression of the process and lets the canvas capture the humus, the soul – the GENIUS – of the place, until it decides to interrupt it, according to a declination of “salvation from pure aesthetics”: this is how memory of life remains imprinted on the canvas and becomes a window into the archeology of time. A perfect synergy between the architectural grandeur of the place and the warm heart that ideally inhabits its foundations … beyond the visible.