Malerbe
Franco Arocha
Tiziano Martini
7/06/2019 – 19/07/2019
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Malerbe
Otto Zoo is presenting Malerbe, a show that proposes a dialogue between the works by Franco Arocha (Guatemala 1992) and Tiziano Martini (Soltau, Germany, 1983). These are two artists who are attracted by the most hidden and invisible side of painting, the side concerned with memory and the technique of painting, without mediations.
Franco Arocha, a painter and performer, has recently begun a series of works about urban surfaces, specifically the walls of the city in which he lives or journeys to: through a collection of fragments of wall plaster, paint or graffiti that create the external skin of buildings, he manages to recount the aesthetics as well as the identity of a place. In fact his work consists of realising, with these remains, painterly collages that become portraits of towns, urban memories and stratifications.
After a period of residing in Milan, with the collaboration of Otto Zoo, Arocha has produced a series of collages with materials collected from the walls of the city which, in the show, will relate together some small works made in Mexico City where he currently lives.
Tiziano Martini, for his second show at Otto Zoo, is interested in the purity of painterly material and the processual aspect of its use: having abandoned images, pretexts for starting off the act of painting, and having also diminished the importance of the artist as a generator, there remain surfaces, operative methods, and materials, which all become the very content of the works.
His work is a continuous and open reflection on the processual possibilities of painting and its components: the results are cohesions of layers of acrylic paint, smooth or mirroring surfaces, abrasions rather than objects, halfway between sculpture and painting and always balanced between the will of the colours and the aims of the artist.
On show in Milan will be some previously unseen works on paper and large-scale canvases that are the beginning of a further inquiry into the experimental manner of the artist in recent years.
Franco Arocha lives in Mexico City. He was in residence at the La Tunca Foundation in El Salvador and at the NARS Foundation in Brooklyn, New York. His work has been exhibited at OCMA, Orange County Museum in California, the MADC, Muse de Arte y Diseño de Costa Rica, San Josè, and at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York.
Tiziano Martini lives in Val di Zoldo in the province of Belluno. He was awarded a scolarship by LIA (Leipzig International Art), Baumwollspinnerei, and has been in residence at the Lepsien Art Foundation, Düsseldorf. He has held solo shows in the Achenbachhagemeier gallery, Düsseldorf, and A plus B, Brescia. He has taken part in various group shows in Italian and international galleries and institutions, including Casa Testori and Rivoli Due, Milan; the Museo di Lissone; the Galleria Civica, Monfalcone; the Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa, Venice; the Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf; the Kunstverein Koelnberg, Cologne; WERKSCHAU Halle 12, Liepzig; the Castello Solitude, Stuttgart; and Andersen’s Contemporary, Copenhagen, Tierry Goldberg, New York. In 2020 he will be participating in the Hudson Valley Art Residency, at The Macedonia Institute, New York.