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wroteonedad · 1 year

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A Dive Into Toiletpaper

A woman lays on a harshly lit blue floor next to a lobster, a man in a garish suit paints the entire globe a hue of turquoise, a lady devours a chocolate bar on top of stacks of money. This is just a few different types of the absurd imagery that can be seen with a slight delve into surrealist magazine Toiletpaper. Founded by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, the magazine comes out twice a year and has a huge and bright website accompanying the ongoing project.

Image from Toiletpaper magazine.

The two artists met on a shoot for W magazines art issue in 2009. There's not a great deal to the story other than they met on shoot, Cattelans camera broke and Ferrari agreed to let Cattelan use his. The rest is a deep level history. The two artists create an intriguing alternative to art when considering Cattelan having years of experience of the fine art field vs Ferrari who mostly focused on advertisement and commercial photography works. It would be hard to go into much detail about Toiletpaper magazine without discussing both the artists who created Toiletpaper in the first place, so let's hop back three steps before we revisit.

Maurizio Cattelan

Cattelan is an Italian visual artist, considered to be one of the controversial in the contemporary art world. I've discussed some of the types of works in an essay last year where I went into a vague explanation about his golden toilet that was stolen from the art gallery and more recently, the banana that was duct taped to the wall. The piece itself was titled Comedian and was a reflection on how fast things are passed around on social media in this current climate. People were quick to completely slate this piece of artwork in particular, branding it boring and not art, but the piece was never created to be a beautiful piece of art. It was simply created to have a message behind it.

Comedian sold for a hefty $120,000 at the Art Basel, making it a very expensive banana, but it was never clear just how long these bananas would be displayed on the wall for. Would they replace the banana or would they just let the banana shrivel up and die? And what's worse is the performance artist who then went to one of the shows and took the banana off the wall to then eat it ???? I've done a whole art degree and contemporary art still really confuses me.

Cattelan's work is created for discussion, to intrigue the viewer, and he asks us to reflect on what the meaning of art really is and to create joke pieces of works that are thought provoking.

Pierpaolo Ferrari

Ferrari began his work in Milan in the early 90s, typically focusing on advertisements, shooting the campaigns for the likes of Nike, Mercedes Benz, Heineken and MTV to name a few. Aside from working on Toiletpaper magazine, Ferrari also shoots Hollywood actors and models for the likes of Vogue magazine. Think bright, surreal, out of this world. The works Ferrari produces very much resemble a cut and paste job from a magazine, a layered collage, or sometimes nostalgia. Solely based on the colour palette that Ferrari chooses to use in his works, saturated pastel colours, loud backgrounds, the person typically modelled into something that feels ironic to look at.

Like I'm not really sure how Ferrari got away with placing Michael B Jordan into the galaxy, held up by a giant hand, but I love it and it works. This image was taken from the Hollywood issue of Vanity Fair, a special issue for 2021 which was produced and photographed by both Cattelan and Ferrari together. The whole spread and the image used for the cover was just as bonkers as the rest of it.

Imagine the wild performance artist constantly getting himself under fire for creating such controversial pieces that then end up being stolen, eaten or straight up pranked who then begins to work with a bonkers surrealist commercial photographer. That is Toiletpaper magazine. It's a joined forces sharing their one braincell type of work, but it works so well.

Every image created for every issue is created entirely from scratch, despite some of the images looking like they've come from the weird side of the countless stock images online. The two artists simply start with a loose theme that they want to present in the magazine and they create everything for the issue from there, it seems like a never ending major project. Every 6 months features a brand new branch from the tree onto the next subject. The way in which the magazine is produced is also very similar to the way it would work back when I was creating my uni projects,,, scrapping a huge majority of the images for the project simply because they weren't on theme enough. This for Toiletpaper was that images were scrapped from the issues because they didn't have enough uncanny ambiguity.

The large scale images featured throughout the glossy biannual issues of the magazine create a world that is so similar, something that we have all lived before, but it looks so alien all at the same time. An image of a little dog across the double page spread looks normal at first glance until you realise that the dog has a pipe in its mouth and is smoking it. The types of images featured in the magazine feel like the types of things you would see in your dreams, or nightmares, you decide. The images paint this idea to be familiar with something, but also disgusted and it works. For Christmas, my boyfriend gifted me issue 15 of the magazine and upon a general flick through, I doused my eyes on this image of a woman who appears to be licking an ashtray. The ashtray filled with ash and cigarette butts, I was horrified, but I also couldn't tear myself away from the page.

The duo have taken their images from the pages of their magazine and brought it out into real world collabs, these including Vice magazine, Absolut and Martin Parr to name a few examples. Some of the names they have worked with feels like the two have got a hat, written some names in there and pulled them out at random.

Toiletpaper advert for Absolut Vodka.

The Absolut x Toiletpaper collaboration may be one of the most interesting in the use of artists, the statement the advert was trying to make, but also how it relates to the brand at the same time. The duo have done a really eye opening job at creating this advert. The ad solely focuses around how women on average are paid 14.5% less than a male doing the same job as them, next to the text features an companying image of a woman in a money note dress cutting a rope. The male hand is seen from the bottom right corner pulling a string which is attached to the woman's dress as if to portray how she is working harder than him and yet he is the person receiving the main profits of her work.

The bright red background is both portrayed to present this high alert danger, a bright hue that is set to capture the attention of anyone walking by this if the advert was displayed on a billboard somewhere. Not only that, but it is also the typical colouring that Cattelan and Ferrari love to use in their sets of work. It is something that is powerful and captivating, I really like this piece of work I can't lie. It has a 'the more I look at it, the more I like it' aura to it.

Toiletpaper exhibition w/ Martin Parr @ The French Academy.

Another unlikely collaboration that blends and works perhaps a little too well together. This was the Toiletpaper x Martin Parr collaboration exhibition. The show was called 'Villa Toilet Martin Medici Paper Parr', the works between the three artists are then displayed outside in the gardens of the building.

This collaboration is interesting because the show came about after the three artists had already teamed up before to create their own photobook and also a special edition of Toiletpaper magazine and they all joined forces to showcase the best of their works. It's kind of like a sequel to the physical photobook that already existed, but instead you can immerse yourself within all of the images and look at them all larger than ever before. The works of Toiletpaper, we know that they typically create work that appears to be something we are familiar with, and all disgusted by. I feel that Martin Parr does take on a similar approach with his works. Parr has a portfolio extending over decades, typically using public areas such as the beach to document and record people of the beach. While it's quite a familiar scene, it also disgusts me in the way that I remember than human beings are all a little bit gross and a bit of an ick, I hope that makes sense.

Martin Parr's Life's A Beach @ Giant Gallery. 2022.

There is an irony with how they are very different artists, but the overall works they create are very similar and work incredibly well within an exhibition space.

Toiletpaper for the Vice photo issue. 2019.

When doing research into the collaborations that Cattelan and Ferrari have created, it was no surprise to me that they had worked with Vice in the past. It makes the most sense, the way in which I wouldn't raise an eyebrow if they had worked with Adult Swim in the past too.

The duo worked for Vice for the first time in 2012 and have since designed four covers for them as well as being featured in the yearly photo issue three times. The image they created for the 2019 photo issue had to be my favourite because I think it is something that perfectly explains the types of work that Cattelan and Ferrari creates. The knight in a suit holding a banana is very much an ode to the controversy of Comedian, a little reminder of a piece of art which we may have forgotten as the year went on, I for sure didn't. The knights against the striking background is in summary to the surrealist commercial works that Ferrari has graced us with over the years. The cover for the magazine was also in homage to Natalia LL and her piece Consumer Art, a piece which had also been censored in Poland at the time.

All in all, Toiletpaper as a collective are ahead of their time. Through their controversies and little scandals, this duo are not going anywhere anytime soon and I live to see what types of surrealist disgusting work that they come up with next. I'm so grateful that my uni lecturer introduced me to the work of these two back when I was creating my final major project because I feel as though they have become a major influence on the types of works that I create today and the things I will continue to create in the future.

The full Toiletpaper magazine website can be found here

You can purchase the Toiletpaper x Martin Parr photobook here

#writing #art review #art essay #toiletpaper #maurizio cattelan #pierpaolo ferrari #martin parr #vice #absolut

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