ARTISTS' BOOKS AND BOOKS ON ARTISTS' BOOKS

"The images in the second issue, dated January 2011, look like they come from a variety of sources and periods, from 19th-century crime scene to French New Wave film still. On the grimy wall next to a dark stairwell, someone has scrawled the word HOPE, with an arrow pointing down; on a blood-splattered table, a knife, a meaty heart, and a horseshoe spell out IOU. Knowing Cattelan’s bent for the perverse and the outrageous, it will come as no surprise that all these images are his own—made in collaboration with Italian photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari and a crew of clever co-conspirators..."
–Vince Aletti, Photograph Magazine

"TOILET PAPER, a visual communication project that grew out of a collaboration between artist Maurizio Cattelan and photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari, is a next-generation magazine that combines commercial photography, twisted narratives and surreal imagery to create a series of powerful, ambiguous visual tableaux.
Maurizio Cattelan is once again challenging the rules of the contemporary cultural system that he himself belongs to, subverting its paradigms: this time, by pokink fun at the world of slick magazines and stuffy, self-referential art critics. TOILET PAPER fearlessly builds a bridge between commercial photography and fine art, relying on the camera of well-known Italian photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari to create an archive of images that seem to bring Cattelan's dreams, fixations and nightmares to life. In an interview with the Italian edition of Vogue, Pierpaolo Ferrari commented, 'The magazine springs from a passion/obsession that Maurizio and I have in common. Each picture springs from an idea, even a simple one, and then becomes a complex orchestration of people who build tableaux vivants. This project is also a sort of mental outburst'.
–Art Report, March, 2011