• Title: Looking for the Right Angle
• Artist: ZT Tosha
• Year: 2026
• Cycle: Aperture
• Medium: Archival pigment print, tempera, torn handmade paper (collage), watercolor-tempera (gouache) on Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper
• Dimensions: Width 40 cm x Height 30 cm
• Signed: Verso
• Certificate of authenticity: Issued by the artist

Looking for the Right Angle is the third completed work in Aperture, a new cycle of small-format works on paper that takes as its subject the conditions under which depth, concealment, and proximity become visible on a flat surface. Each piece in the cycle arrives at this problem by a different technical route — archival and documentary layering in one, a single constrained line in another. Here, the route is physical. The print is not illustrated upon; it is excavated.

The work begins from a fully resolved source image — a saturated field of arching red forms divided by a clean vertical seam.

Printed onto archival Hahnemühle paper, that image becomes ground rather than conclusion. Sanding, water, and direct tearing strip the surface back unevenly: the source’s acid green desaturates to a worn rose-grey, its coral reds darken toward rust, its clean graphic edges soften into a grained, eroded register. What survives is not the original composition but a partial excavation of it — recognizable, but recovered rather than printed. Tellingly, the tears fall along divisions already latent in the source image. The destruction that follows the print is not arbitrary; it is guided by a structure the picture already contained.

Two bands of raw, deckled paper interrupt the field vertically, torn rather than cut. Their origin lies in an earlier, mirror-symmetrical composition abandoned mid-process — a change of direction Tosha has chosen to leave legible rather than conceal. At the composition’s center, a short sequence of diagonal dashes crosses the red ground, laid down by hand in a dense, gouache-loaded pigment, arrived at only after extended practice on separate sheets testing where the gesture should land. Tosha has spoken of the sequence in the register of code: a minimal alphabet of dot and dash, a message rather than a measurement. It is a deliberate transmission — and it does not reach the tear beside it. It stops short, leaving a visible gap between the last mark and the raw edge it approaches. That gap is where the work’s tension resides.

The physical processes used to produce the piece have left a lasting trace on the paper itself: water, sanding, and tearing have caused the sheet to ripple and warp gently across the areas of heaviest intervention. This distortion will not be corrected in framing. The work will be mounted without glass contact, so that its surface continues to catch and shift light as a physical object does, rather than as a flattened image. Looking for the Right Angle asks to be encountered this way — not as a picture bearing texture, but as an object carrying, however modestly, real topography.

The gesture at the center of this practice — a single mark rehearsed at length before being committed irreversibly to a surface — has a clear lineage in Lucio Fontana’s practiced incisions, which turned the flat canvas into a field with real spatial depth. The physical excavation of the print itself finds kinship in Alberto Burri’s worked and wounded materials, and in Antoni Tàpies’s insistence that a worked surface can carry the density of matter itself — sand, cloth, wall — rather than merely depict it. Tosha’s distinction from this lineage is the presence of the print as a starting condition: where Fontana and Tàpies began with raw material, Looking for the Right Angle begins with a finished image, and treats that finish as the first layer to be undone.

Aperture is ongoing. Further works will be added to the cycle as they are completed, each testing a different means by which something concealed, distant, or unresolved might be made to surface.

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