ZT Tosha | Only What I Remember Year: 2026 Medium: Oil, fine-art print on stretched canvas, mixed-colour grey oil, wooden-fork intervention Dimensions: 142 × 80 cm
ZT Tosha | Only What I Remember Year: 2026 Medium: Oil, fine-art print on stretched canvas, mixed-colour grey oil, wooden-fork intervention Dimensions: 142 × 80 cm

ZT Tosha | Only What I Remember

  • Medium: Oil, fine-art print on stretched canvas, mixed-colour grey oil, wooden-fork intervention
  • Year: 2026
  • Dimensions: 142 × 80 cm

ZT Tosha’s Only What I Remember is a painting about looking at an image after it has ceased to be fully available.

Its surface is dominated by a complex grey, built from mixed colour rather than a neutral monochrome. Across it, repeated grooves and incisions move in irregular sequences. Made with a wooden fork dragged through wet oil, the marks possess the rhythm of writing without becoming language. They are graphic, but remain stubbornly material. The eye reads them and then encounters the resistance of paint.

What makes the painting particularly compelling is that the visible surface is not the beginning of the work.

Beneath it is a fine-art print of Tosha’s earlier The Image of Thought. Tosha repainted that image in oil, following its forms and colours by hand, and subsequently covered the reconstruction with the grey paint. The fork intervention cuts into this second image.

The distinction is crucial: the original is not being excavated. The memory of the original is being excavated.

That small shift gives the painting its unusual temporal structure. The Image of Thought survives here not as an intact earlier work but as something that has passed through reproduction, the artist’s hand, concealment, and partial recovery. What emerges through the grey is therefore already a reconstruction.

Tosha has made the act of remembering part of the object’s material history.

The painting belongs to a long tradition of overpainting, erasure, and the return of buried images, but its point of departure is unusually intimate. Rather than appropriating an external image, Tosha subjects his own previous work to a process of reconstruction and disappearance. His archive becomes raw material.

The grey field consequently operates less as a symbol of forgetting than as a pictorial condition. Colour remains underneath colour. Forms remain beneath forms. Nothing is completely available, yet nothing has entirely disappeared.

This produces a particular kind of looking. The viewer does not simply inspect the surface; the viewer begins to look through it. Fragments of colour and form acquire the status of evidence. The mind attempts to connect them into an image that the painting refuses to give back in full.

Here Only What I Remember finds its place within OPUS: APERTURE and Tosha’s broader Archaeology of Perception. The aperture is not an opening onto an intact image. It is the narrow, unstable passage through which something remembered becomes visible again.

The work is strongest precisely where its conceptual premise and its physical presence become indistinguishable. The fork marks are not illustrations of memory. The buried painting is not merely a metaphor for the past. The surface itself has become the site where remembering takes place.

There is no restoration here.

There is only return—partial, altered, and already transformed by the act of remembering.

Only What I Remember does not recover the earlier image.

It shows us what an earlier image becomes when memory is the only way back to it.