The aesthetics of mold

 

 

by Cynthia Penna

 

 

After their debut at the Castel dell’Ovo in Naples in March 2010, after the national and international experiences, after the visual impact with the canvases of Pollock and de Koonig in America and their meetings with American art critics and historians, and above all after the fortunate encounter with the Emblema Museum in Italy, a rich and by now well-organized trajectory of works and significance has opened up for the Ttozoi duo.
A professional trajectory that follows the course of their art and that unfolds in an instant, the very instantaneity and suddenness of the gesture with which matter is cast onto a canvas.
An instant and the hand has to glide, manipulate, throw, spread, with the speed of lighting, earth, water, flour and many “other” materials on the canvas. Not a doubt, not an uncertainty: everything is resolved in the space of a gesture, the time it takes for a hand to tackle, attack and caress a canvas. It is love, passion, violence, aggression, it is body and soul which are merged in a gesture.
The heritage of past movements as Gutai, Fluxus, abstract expressionism, Action painting and Spatialism is once again echoed in that fleeting moment, in that gesture, quick as lighting, that decides it all, in which the work of art of Ttozoi is born, becomes evident, allows itself to be seen, opens to life to then begin a long and slow process of transformation in which Nature accomplishes its inexorable course.
A work of art which has the ability to live its own autonomous life, which opens like a flower, like a child to life and the process of “creation” is no longer only intellectual and gestural, but true “natural” creation.
Yes, because the canvases of Ttozoi live their own life and develop after that the hand and the gesture of the artist have completed their “creative task”. Their “moulds” on canvas continue to move, to change and to develop autonomously, irremediably; the artist can no longer influence the creative process of “Nature”. It is the latter, by now, which makes its course independently of the hand and of that gesture which has generated everything.
Ttozoi’s “moulds” are Man-made creative processes aided by the autonomous creative process of Nature which, like all its creative processes, slips from the fingers and escapes the will of Man, who can no longer control it, and proceeds in its own way, inexorably.
At this point all the artist can do is make a conclusive choice: once the creative process of Nature has been triggered, he can only “stop it”, also in this case inexorably and definitively, by “killing it”. The artist is forced to interrupt the procedure of formation of the moulds, a procedure which, once begun, would lead the object irremediably to its destruction in the same way as all the other vital procedures of Nature: birth, development, death.
The “salvage” effected by the artist in this case is an aesthetic one: the topical moment is determined by the “purity” of the aesthetic or in other words the precise, unique and unrepeatable moment in which the creative process of Nature merges with the creative process of the human mind, inducing that very hand that has made the initial gesture to effect a new gesture of interruption, of freezing, of killing of the natural process. The creation of “beauty” thus becomes an itinerary of life and death: there is no aesthetics without life, no aesthetics without death.
This is the profound meaning of the aesthetics of Ttozoi’s Moulds: a perfect synchrony of times, gestures, Nature, emotion, and sentiment. Here the work of art is born only and irremediably in that precise instant or never again: it is an act of absolute creation which the human intellect can only conceive, partially develop and bring to completion through an act of “suppression”, of “interruption”. In short, the work of art is born from an alchemic magic which involves bodies and soul.
Like alchemists of the Twenty-first century, Ttozoi unhinge the traditional system of painting, as their precursors of the Gutai movement had done in the Twentieth, in order to inaugurate another that sees the formation of a new relationship of force, a new element, consisting of the “natural” process that acts directly on and within the work of art. An alternation of physicality and rationality, intellect and corporeity, a conceptual moment which is followed by a gestural one, then the natural one and once again the emotional. An interesting and systemic alternation between Man and Nature in a new existential relationship which determines the aesthetics and produces Beauty.