TTOZOI

Ttozoi, Genius Loci, #8, 2021, Abstract painting, canvas, blue, green, nature

2021

Stefano Forgione (Avellino, 1969) and Giuseppe Rossi (Naples, 1972) are the artistic duo operating under the pseudonym TTOZOI since 2010, year of their first solo show curated by Luca Beatrice at Castel Dell’Ovo, Naples. Stefano (Graduated in Architecture) and Giuseppe (Graduated in Economics) are both self-taught. Since their youth, they approach History of Art through an Informal Culture lens, experimenting various artistic techniques (charcoal, Indian ink, watercolor, acrylic, oil, spray, collage, molds) satisfying their aesthetic vocation and their conceptual interest in iconographic processes. The core of their dialogue is the awareness that "Art has always been contemporary" and that "the artist cannot operate without reference to the past. Starting from this they started working on many cycles of worked based on the “intervention gap”, a suspension of time in which Nature operates on canvas, treated before by the artists with different material. One of the most renown is called Genius Loci and it was realized in three UNESCO sites establishing a dialogue with universal symbols of Italian architectural and archaeological culture: The Royal Palace of Caserta (2018) with its Samnite necropolis dating back to the 4th century BC, brought to light in 1990 in the area below the second courtyard; the Pompei Archeological site Amphitheatre (2018) where the duo used the ambulatories, buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 bc and then brought back to light; the Campanian Anfiteatheatre of Capua, Naples (2021), that has a prominent role Classical and Modern culture, and in the collective immagination for being second in size only to the Colosseum, to which it probably served as a model. The next chapter will be realize soon at Colosseum in Rome. Ttozoi’s works art part of many International and Italian Collections including: Salvatore Emblema Museum, Naples; Italian Cultural Institute Los Angeles (USA); Luciano Benetton, Imago Mundi; Italian American Museum, San Francisco (USA); Italian Cultural Institute, San Francisco (Usa); Italian Consulate, San Francisco (USA); Royal Palace of Caserta, Permanent Contemporary Collection, Caserta; Santa Margherita Spa Collection, Marzotto Group, Vicenza.