TODD & FITCH
Nicolas Todd (1969) and Damien Fitch (1964) have been working together since the beginning of year 2000. Their language, initially abstract, repetitive and interactive, soon occupied the narrative field, seizing figures and symbols of the 20th century.
Use of light is one of the permanent features in creations by Nicolas Todd and Damien Fitch : considerated as a material in its own right and treated as such, its color, purity and intensity comprise for them a means of reinterpreting, or better yet reconsidering, major subjects of 20th century art and, in nearly instantaneous re-appropriation, certain early 21st century works. With real, creative jubilation, their pieces address death, sex, fantasy and phantoms of the time.
Each comes from a different world and imaginative universe.
Nicolas Todd occasionally reminisces about New York memories, what he read at that time, his thoughts about time and space, the hours spent at the Museum of Natural History in Central park, the months spent under the sun of Western states and the torments of a job he didn’t like but that gave him freedom. He speaks little, not bothering with preliminaries or circumlocutions. What he wants to say is essential.
Another figure altogether is Damien Fitch, whose manners have been too polished over the years. If one insists, one learns he was a musician, that he unenthusiastically paced the corridors of law schools and had to tolerate ties and dark suits. A Fitzgerald-like ancestor appears to have left him nothing other than his name and the memory of apathetic outings in gleaming American convertibles.
Nicolas Todd claims that the Arts reached him via Case House Studies, Damien Fitch via le Vaux and le Nôtre. they join forces in equal devotion to art of the second half of the 20th century, notably Pop Art, Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg, then Dan Flavin, Donald Jude, Cy Twombly, Bacon, Murakami, minimalists and architects of international style. They do not consider themselves as an artistic duo, but together, just manage to be one. Their combined amount of time, ideas and efforts produces work over which neither has supremacy and that contains, inextricably and irresistibly mixed, traces of their obsessions, requirements and convictions.
Followed and already recognized by top notch collectors, who place their pieces on their walls next to those of major signatures, they pursue an essential path, marked by stunning maturity.
Todd and Fitch set no limits, neither in the subjects they want to treat, nor in their choice of medium and material with which they express themselves. Their creations testify to their consummate mastery of technique. Their ability to create ambiguity when perceiving immediately instigates dialogue between the eye and work that doesn’t deny pure esthetics.