PROJECT ROOM

Otto Zoo is pleased to present the project room installation Attraversare il paesaggio, by the TSSR group of artists Mattia Di Leva, Bruno Fronteddu, and Giacomo Della Maria. Established in Bologna in 2005, TSSR unites painting, sculpture, video, and sound in its installations.

Attraversare il paesaggio is a project made specifically for Otto Zoo and derives from La Pasqua della Croce, a work that has involved the group over the past three years and that is organised into various works, all linked to the passing of time in nature. One part, Stazioni, was finished in February 2014, while Quattro was completed in the spring of 2016.

Winter 2014, Flaminia Minor

The dark shadows are the wood of the pole, the tannin that has stained the canvas.

The red is the serum left by the iron. The barbed wire that has pierced the weave.

The description of the process is born from the picture. Not vice versa. Only by selling the finished and installed work can I (the artist) be aware of and talk about the work.

While I work I have no idea how it will be resolved; I have an image in mind that I follow; I can know my tools and what I use for my work, but I cannot know precisely how the material will react, what direction the paint will take as I apply it, or how it will affect the surface.

Spring 2016, Cà Colmello

We have passed the days trying to understand them, the works. To get to know the action that earth, iron, and wood have produced. They started with us and have turned out to be different, independent, and this has required the weaving of a new fabric, of a relationship that did not exist.

They stank, they were slimy and scaly. An organically pure material. We had buried them and we expected a corpse in exchange, but the earth insinuated itself and gave us five heaps of life. Life born from death.

We dried and undressed the skeletons, the poles wrapped in barbed wire. We found the skin of our hands was torn to pieces.

Each fold we reached opened into drawings like butterfly wings. We had to take care of them and respect their new form in order to use them later.

After having  laid them out we wrapped them and deposited them again. They had to be systemised by the air, outside the viscera of the earth.

October 2016, Milan, Otto Zoo gallery

Attraversare il paesaggio consists of two large installations accompanied by a copious documentary backup. Recintazione (from Stazioni, 2014) is derived from an old enclosure for animals, made from chestnut wood and barbed wire; Quattro, 2016, consists of wood and rust monotypes on canvas: these are the central body of this exhibition which is concerned with the painterly development of the “internal” elements of the landscape.

These works have been made by using an “earthy” method of printing, obtained by burying the four sculptures that make up Recinzione. It is an improvised method that needs the right characteristics of the earth, a humid season, and a very long printing period in order for the materials to be acted on by the atmospheric agents and the landscape.

The project is being exhibited here for the first time, and with it the Otto Zoo gallery begins its project room series concerned with the relationship of contemporary art with nature, a series that will culminate next year with a site-specific project in the Monferrato countryside.

Mattia Di Leva (Bologna 1983) lives and works in Bologna. He began his career as an artist while very young, and he still continues his research into subtracting elements, to the point of using a few such humble materials as rust, ashes, and wax. In 2002 he founded Gruppo DOA together with Bruno Fronteddu (Nuoro 1977) who, instead, inquires into the various representations of the link between the natural and the cognitive worlds.

Since 2011 Bruno Fronteddu has managed a house/workshop on the Tuscan-Romagnolo Apennines in which the natural environment is united to art experience. Since 2004 they have collaborated with Giacomo Della Maria (Cagliari 1977) and have founded the TSSR group.

Della Maria lives and works in Italy and Berlin, and conducts an eclectic research ranging from painting to sound; he models his language on the concept inquired into by the work itself.