Via di Visiale
06049 Spoleto PG
Italia

The opening of the TTOZOI duo’s exhibition, on SATURDAY 30 JUNE at 16.00 at the Casa Romana in Spoleto.
The exhibition is curated by Gianluca Marziani and included in the Festival Of Two Worlds’ official programme. The Press Conference will be at 11.00 at the Piano Nobile’s gallery.
GENIUS LOCI, conceived by Stefano Forgione and Giuseppe Rossi, curated by Gianluca Marziani, originates from the idea of creating works of art directly in the chosen historical places, through the original technique of natural proliferation of mould on jute, with further painting additions.
Gianluca Marziani: Mould becomes a pure linguistic code, a biological application that leads painting to the limit of its possible mutations. TTOZOI’s grammar regenerates the archetypal models of Calzolari and Penone, bringing the iconographic orbit back into the evolutionary perimeters of the painting. The natural action is not dispersed but takes place on circumscribed surfaces, under the control of the space of action. An event between randomness and control that radicalizes the link between Art and Nature, making biology a collaborative and elaborative phenomenon. A lively dialectic that brings the creative factor into the beating heart of the natural cycle…
The “naturally informal conceptualism” or “the naturally absolute informal” that is at the base of TTOZOI’s work, evolves its natural creative process, coming into contact with three UNESCO sites, universal symbols of Italian architectural and archaeological culture: the REGGIA DI CASERTA (November 2017) with its Sanniti necropolis dating back to the 4th century BC, brought to light in 1990 in the area below the second courtyard; the AMPHITHEATRE OF THE POMPEI ARCHEOLOGICAL COMPLEX (December 2017) where the duo used the ambulacra, buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 and then brought to light; finally the COLOSSEUM (soon), the largest amphitheatre in the world, global symbol of Rome and icon of Italy. Within this process that becomes molecular and conceptual fusion, the exhibition arrives at the CASA ROMANA in Spoleto, a sort of exhibition spin-off that inserts a private residence between the three monumental stages.
Gianluca Marziani: The three chosen areas represent the apotheosis of the Italic genius, the archaeological peak of ancient lustres of human genius. Inside this monumental cycle a passage of recollection was needed, an intimate dimension of the natural process. A domestic adaptation that would bring the works back into the space of the domestic cycle, where historical memory is linked to the design of modern habitats….
The Roman House in Spoleto, dating to the beginning of the first century A.D., is a stately home discovered by Spoletan archaeologist Giuseppe Sordini in 1885-1886 and dug several times until 1914. It is located partly under the Town Hall Square and partly under the Town Hall of which it occupies the foundations. Today it is the most visited site by tourists in Spoleto.
In Spoleto there will be a rigorous selection of the works from the first two stages, as well as a project of site-specific proliferation, designed for the impluvium of the Roman House. Fifteen works will be inserted with camouflage and respect for the environment, almost to blend the living nature of stones with the controlled nature of natural mould.
Gianluca Marziani: The integration with the places occurs through branched proliferation. No longer something purely formal but a process that integrates visible and invisible, memory and present, history and news, individuals and communities…
In the first two stages the artists created the works in situ, installing some sealed showcases in which the canvases remained for about 40 days: Time and Nature did the rest. During the gestation it is the canvas that captures the humus, the soul of every place, going beyond the visible, allowing the memory of the cultural “container” to be transferred to it through two factors: the “emotional conditioning” and the “environmental conditioning”, able to evoke the history and the suggestions of the chosen places in the observer’s mind.
The informal process, carried out by four hands, involves the use of organic materials (various flours), water and natural pigments on jute canvases, then placed in special cases that encourage the natural proliferation of moulds, with always different manifestations; feeding themselves on the organic part only, the spores interact with the work according to an unpredictable, apparently chaotic scheme. TTOZOI actually monitors the progression of the process, until it decides to interrupt it, according to a declination of “saving from aesthetics in pureness”. Only at this point will the canvases be pictorially finished and completed, leaving the traces of the passage of nature visible.
Gianluca Marziani: Informal painting finds its most significant evolution, an aesthetic landing place that distorts the interpretative factor of the works. All abstract appearances are transformed into a process with a high figurative value, where what we see leads us far beyond the pure form, into the pictorial stratification of memories, experiences, dynamic processes, external contributions…
Thursday 19 July, 2018 a personal exhibition is scheduled at the Reggia di Caserta. A closing exhibition will be held, finally, in a prestigious Capitoline museum, so as to expose all the works made in the three monumental complexes. In Caserta the complete cycle that was realized in the months of proliferation inside the Sanniti necropolis will be exhibited.
TTOZOI_Biography
Stefano Forgione (Avellino, 1969) and Giuseppe Rossi (Naples, 1972) are the two artists who operate under the pseudonym of TTOZOI since 2010, when their personal exhibition was held at Castel Dell’Ovo (curated by Luca Beatrice). Stefano (Degree in Architecture) and Giuseppe (Degree in Economics) are both self-taught. Since their adolescence they have been experimenting with various artistic techniques (charcoal, Indian ink, watercolour, acrylic, oil, spray, collage…) and approached the History of Art to deepen their knowledge of Informal culture, following their aesthetic and conceptual vocation. In December 2006 the common passion for informal themes will bring the two together again, after years spent in various Italian cities. At the centre of their confrontation there is the awareness that “Art has always been Contemporary” and that “the Artist cannot operate without the past”: hence the elaboration of a project – based on “concept” and “form”, “time” and “matter” – that is becoming the spokesperson of a small revolution in the experimental field of painting. TTOZOI is the creator of the so-called “intervention void”, a real expectation, following the simultaneous four-hand action on the canvas.
The exhibition ends on Sunday 7 October 2018
Info: www.palazzocollicola.it https://www.facebook.com/PALAZZOCOLLICOLA
Palazzo Collicola: info@palazzocollicola.it
Sistema Museo: ufficiostampa@sistemamuseo.it
