Tino Pizza
Painting, sculpture and urban character culture
A fictional artist as mirror
Tino Pizza is an invented artist persona developed by Ben & Julia. The work behaves like a parody and a portrait at once, using painting, props, sculpture and installation to stage a character who performs artistic identity in an exaggerated way.
The key idea is poop art rather than pop art. Humour, ego, branding and self mythologising become material, turning the practice into a satire of the art world and a sharp reflection on what it can mean to be an artist today.
Objects, attitude and staged authorship
The project works because it is fully built. The paintings are strong on their own, but they also support a wider fiction made from recurring signs, displays, poses and invented evidence of a career.
What appears comic from a distance becomes more exact up close. Tino Pizza is less a single joke than a complete system for thinking about authorship, taste and performance.
Why doesn’t anyone love my poop?
Tino Pizza lives online as much as he does in the gallery. He uses Instacrap, Facepoop and Youpoop to push his work, posting his latest poops with the absolute conviction that his poop is better than everyone else’s. The joke is also a critique of the endless performance of the artist online: followers, self promotion, personal branding and the pressure to turn every gesture into content.
He even eats Indian food colouring to produce blue, green, orange and multicoloured poops. Tino is a poop artist making poop art, while desperately trying to understand why the audience is not reacting the way he thinks it should.
The same satire runs into music. Tino is also a rapper making crap music, extending the character into record labels, music industry mythology and the same obsession with visibility, status and attention.
Carte Blanche
The exhibition page shows how the fictional practice expanded into a full room installation.
Request a private view
Interested in work around the Tino Pizza project? Contact Mauer Gallery for availability, documentation and appointments.