WEM EDITORIAL #2 TTOZOI
Genius Loci
How to keep track of the soul of a place through a painting? The Italian artistic duo Ttozoidevelops a completely revolutionary language where nature becomes unpredictable and the generating force of art. Through the project “Genius Loci” they implement a new and “pure linguistic code”, a metaphor of the stratification of the memory of the placeand its essence.
With the project Genius Loci, the Italian artistic duo Ttozoi creates rough and abstract inner landscapes, suspended between time and matter, where traces and signs on the canvas are the result of a sui generis process that finds its pictorial character and its constitutive element in the natural proliferation of mold. Genius Loci stems from the need to create works that can express the mystery of life: a microcosm, endowed with its own memory and existence
“We imagined the molds as a bloom that could actually take and conquer space and design its own architecture with its own language.” Ttozoi
The artists create the works in situ and after the intervention on the canvases, they place them in dedicated showcases for a period of 40 days. Time and nature do the rest. The natural proliferation of mold on the canvas, with ever new and different manifestations, is determined by the atmospheric variables of the place. Nature actively interacts with the work initiated by the artists, conquering the space and feeding on the organic part, according to an unknown and always different scheme.
Ttozoi is the creator of the so-called “intervention void”, a real wait, following the simultaneous action of four hands on the canvas, during which, nature blooms in the form of molds. As the curator of the project, Gianluca Marziani, observes “A biological application that leads painting to the limit of its endogenous mutation.”
“The realization phase of the works begins with watering the canvas, after which we use flour to begin the artistic process. The performative act is an incipit that will serve for a further natural intervention of birth, transformation, mutation, and possession of the space, until we decide to interrupt it. What remains on the canvas is no longer the mold, but the memory of the mold itself, the memory of that place, the memory of a life that has lived on that canvas in that specific context and that has conquered and created the space. In a way it’s like Nature is making a self-portrait of herself.”
Ttozoi’s grammar makes the organic trace a definitive sign, capable of enclosing within itself the memory and the very existence of the microcosm of which it is part and from which it is generated.
WEM – Piattaforma e galleria d’Arte – Duo artistico italiano Ttozoi – Opere – Progetto Genius Loci
The Genius Loci series wasrealized in three UNESCO sites establishing a relation with universal symbols of Italian architectural and archaeological culture: The Royal Palace of Caserta (2018); the Pompei Archaeological site Amphitheatre (2018); the Campanian Antitheater of Capua, Caserta (2021); next chapter will be realized soon at Colosseum in Rome.
At the centre of their artistic works there is the awareness that art has always been contemporary, and that the artist cannot operate apart from the past. Actually, the interaction with places is not limited to something purely formal but acts on a wider process that encompasses visible and invisible, memory and present, history and culture, individual and community.
What we see takes us beyond pure form, leading the viewer into the stratification of memory through intimate interior landscapes, as unique as the places that generated them.
An open process where the place gives rise to the painting itself and its constitutive part. A process between randomness and control that fully expresses the link between the human sphere and the sphere of nature, making the proliferation of organic matter a participatory and essential phenomenon.
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. Only later will the canvases be finished and completed by the artists, leaving visible traces of nature’s passage.The memory of life remains imprinted on the canvas and becomes a window into the archaeology of time. A perfect synergy between the architectural impotence of the place and the warm heart that ideally inhabits its foundations… beyond the visible.
