Over the 20th century the boundaries of artistic genres became fluid and were constantly changing. Today, it is not rare in the contem-porary art scene to find work that requires a whole new platform, which can accommodate a hybrid approach,...
Read More Over the 20th century the boundaries of artistic genres became fluid and were constantly changing. Today, it is not rare in the contem-porary art scene to find work that requires a whole new platform, which can accommodate a hybrid approach, combining disciplines such as design, architecture, fashion or even literature. The TWOFOURTWO art group embarked on such a voyage of colla¬bo-ration. From different backgrounds, its members, a visual artist and an architect, explored their common experience and produced a visual base from which they could communicate, between themselves and with viewers.
The work itself does not pretend to be a traditionally accep-ted art form but rather it seeks a place in its own right. It was the creative displacement of both parts, which led them to work as a group. Perhaps their being an “artist collective” has resulted in their work taking on multi-fold messages and meanings. This two person collective had to rely on their openness towards the acceptance of and respect for different opinions, and for multiple ideas through their one collective voice. This has resul¬ted in an artistic practice, which fosters ambiguous readings and for whom a form of “cultural error” is central to their creativity .
The TWOFOURTWO art group was formed on 21th of August 1996 in Nicosia, Cyprus by Costas Mantzalos and Constantinos Koun-nis. It is an Art Group that believes in Art, as an evolutionary insti-tution, which changes over time and mutates with the passing of time. However, like democracy, it believes that art remains a supreme form of power vested in the people and characterized by the recog¬nition of equality of opinions and voices. The work of TWOFOUR¬TWO started from a very personal need to explore the notion of togetherness, the self and the other. Their work evolved and was shaped to investigate the notion of the private and the public space, the personal and the common, the domestic and the inter¬national.
The aesthetic characteristic of TWOFOURTWO’s visual lan-guage remains consistent, marking a territory of industrial or gra-phical materials and forms. However, the semantics and the rhetoric of their work have shifted into other areas. While the construction of the self and the metaphysics of presence remain of central concern, these issues are now approached differently. The self is no longer evoked by a linguistic undetermined dialogue in the absence of the visual body, but a presence or a concept of the self is redefined through a playful exploration into the mechanics of vision. Using the mirror or mirror-like surfaces, the mental viewing of each other escapes any personal reference, and the viewer becomes observed not only by the other but also by him/herself. The work challenges the borderlines of interaction yet still captures an expressive re-action. The deconstruction and manipulation of the body provokes a new perspective of the self, while there is no effort to bring forth a specific self-identity.
TWOFOURTWO art group has used and reinvented new concepts from numerous industrial signs that came down from bankrupted business as a result of the global – and local – financial crisis. Additionally, the group re-contextualized the work, by twisting the meaning of these signs in order to re-create new names/words that promote a critical view of the current situation of our world. It is the “twisted words” as well as the combination of text and image, which illustrate the daily routine of the world through the concepts of consumerism, greed and megalomania; concepts, which can then be ex¬tended into a sociological study which examines identity and belonging. In other words the TWOFOURTWO art group has created “errors” to project new meanings! “Errors” do not exist in visual language – as one understands the etymology of the word – as they do in written language. It is widely accepted that in art the notion of trial and error is a positive element, which encourages crea¬tivity and errors can often be valuable for encouraging more creative thinking and innovation.
