TTOZOI: THEIR BETTER NATURE

di Peter Frank

Natural substances have always provided artists with their materials, and over the last half century artists have even been working with nature’s own processes to create art. TTozoi combines the old tradition(s) and the new, in effect prompting nature to paint its own paintings. Under the name TTozoi, the Neapolitan artists Stefano Forgione and Pino Rossi practice an unusual method of painting: they apply molds along with pigment to canvas, cultivate the molds into growing up to a certain point, and then arresting the molds’ advance. In a way, TTozoi paints as if making cheese or brewing beer; their procedure is radical only in the context of painting. Still, their radical procedure invites not simply constant intercession, but constant modification.
However careful their calibrations and controls, TTozoi must accept a large degree of chance in the formulation of their “brewed” art. In this respect, they recapitulate not so much the automatist processes of the surrealists and their abstract expressionist inheritors – which sprung from the minds of humans – but the automatism-driven results of postwar abstract painting in Europe, notably art informel. With their mineral blooms, their fields of staining and spotting, their expanses of loamy color and moments of deep luminosity, TTozoi’s canvases seem as if they could have been fashioned in Paris or Milan sixty years earlier – with one very important distinction. Both form and color in TTozoi’s painting, now more than ever, vibrate with an unearthly – or unusually earthy – granularity, a rich sensuality born of crumbly instability that, rather than simply lying on the surface, radiates from the imbued canvas itself. In this regard, TTozoi conflates European art informel with American color-field painting and “lyrical abstraction.” The results seem not simply painterly, however, but fecund and nourishing, as if they were inducing a synesthetic link between eye and tongue.
After the human body, nature itself is probably art’s favorite subject – no wonder, as its myriad splendors and sources of sustenance surround us, support us, and define our consciousness. TTOzoi allows nature to participate actively in the current artistic discourse not just as subject, but as author. In this, they join any number of artists practicing the world over who harness aspects of the natural world to the production of artworks – not simply as a way of directly exploiting, and sometimes altering, the aesthetic possibilities of natural process, but as a way of commenting upon nature and our relationship to it. In this context the natural dynamic is intricately intertwined with the human impulses to create and explore. Nature fuses with culture. In the last analysis, then, TTozoi is not just a collaboration between two humans, but a collaboration between two humans and their ecosystem.

Peter Frank Los Angeles-Berkeley September 2014