quinta-feira, 13 de março de 2014

TOYZE : a smile a day



Not identical twins


By ANTÓNIO CERVEIRA PINTO

        “… certain characteristics become more alike as twins age, such as IQ and personality” — Wikipedia.


António Salvador Carvalho and António José Carvalho are identical twins, or MZ twins, known by close friends as Tó (the older twin - and for the purpose of this writing called T) and Zé (the younger one, Z). TOYZE is a recent trial to fuse both siblings into a single author and signature. It is a tentative third fictional author looking for an impossible dream: complete identity bioengineering. In the context of this project, Z is the most active half of TOYZE and the one responsible for “A smile a day”. This is a work-in-progress around the new meta world of meaning and communication known as comics, street art, toys or, as they like to call it, ‘bonecos’. T is presently in China developing a 3D studio.

T, the older twin, approaches representation as a complex fabric of drawings, erasures, superimposed images, layering sketches after sketches until a last picture come along as a result of a hand battle with the many artifacts, characters and ghosts of his convulsive imagination factory.

Z, the younger twin, not a perfect clone of T, uses his hand as an almost invisible link to what appears as an uninterrupted flow of synthetic imagery, and highly condensate visual narratives that run toward any void available. Some artists and styles have had a great influence on his work: Jacinto Pereira da Costa (a late Renaissance Portuguese artist that painted Sala dos Capelos inside the old Coimbra University building), Walt Disney and comic books in general, but above all the Italian comic artist Jacovitti, author of Jak Mandolino character, as well as the Japanese manga artist, illustrator, and painter, Suehiro Maruo.

Both these twins are prodigious draftsmen, running vague influences from Goya to ‘U-kyoe’ and Manga, Anime and post-Pop adventures like the ones by Japanese artists and collectives like Chiho Aoshima, Henmaru Machino, Aya Takano, Bome, Enlightenment (Hiro Sugiyama), or smart artists like Takashi Murakami, or even Amerindian as well as African folk art.

Eroticism not to say some Porn morphs and radical comments on culture make a clear point as their nihilist attitude towards ‘contemporary art’ and the horrendous conceptual litany that took over hundreds of art schools and the so-called ‘conversation’ of art.

They oppose to this new academia and to this all-over enforced concept art a back to basic deviation. They insist in a wild ‘teknné’, that’s what they do.

For TOYZE not to go with the trend and not to obey the new bureaucratic avant-garde establishment means a complete lack of rampant ambition. These two artists couldn’t careless more about art dealers, museums, ‘biennales’ and art critics than two butterflies running wild in a green field on a Spring sunny morning. Tant pis pour eux! Or tant pis pour nous?

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