There is something genuinely relieving, even hopeful, about time-travelling into the near past and reconnecting with European avant-gardism—a moment when artists were not only making art but living it, communally, as a deliberate force capable of responding to and reshaping social constructs. That sensibility is precisely what is restored by the retrospective “TOUTITÉ – The Study of Form”, curated by Eva Brioschi and Julia Marchand at the Fondazione Antonio Dalle Nogare in Bolzano. This artistic commitment defines the life and work of a figure who remains, somewhat quietly, on the margins of the discourse: Ilia Zdanevich, known by the nom de scène as Iliazd.
Born in Tbilisi in 1894 and dying in Paris in 1975, Iliazd was a writer, typographer, designer, scholar, publisher, and admirer of Byzantine and Georgian sacred architecture. Iliazd's wager was that the artist's true vocation was to challenge the boundaries of a medium, to inhabit every form available, and to charge each one in relation. Despite his nomadic life, Iliazd did not dissipate his energies; he conceptualized the word toutisme, rendered in French and Italian as toutité, as "an artistic attitude that refuses to set spatial or temporal boundaries" and contributed to the creation of new expressive forms.
Installation view. Ph: Fotostudio Jürgen Eheim
The opening section of the show at the Fondazione is dedicated to Iliazd's lifelong engagement with Byzantine and Georgian sacred architecture. Among the works are detailed church-building plans, drawn up after conducting thorough studies of these structures. This study began after an expedition during World War One, when the Russian Army had entered Turkey to study ruined Georgian churches, some of which had long ago been turned into mosques. Iliazd was the draftsman and photographer during the expedition. His engagement with these churches was not only an aesthetic choice, but a re-enactment, a way of learning from the past by physically tracing its logic, reconstructing its decisions, rehearsing its proportions as if to absorb them into one's own body of knowledge. His sketches of Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia and other Byzantine churches suggest a mind that understood history not as something to be observed from a distance but as a living method to be practiced and tested. A form of dialogue across time, of the kind that precisely creates the transtemporal, transdisciplinary conversation that toutité demands.
Installation view. Ph: Tiberio Sorvillo
This commitment to redrawing as a political and ethical act extended beyond architecture, fascinatingly, to cartography. The exhibition includes Iliazd’s interventions on old maps, on which he corrected borders, not as a geographical exercise but as a denunciation of the violence that political borders enact upon peoples and territories. As a Georgian born into an empire and then exiled into another kind of displacement, Iliazd understood borders as impositions, not descriptions. His corrections were a demand for self-determination, rooted in the cause of Georgian independence, an outgrowth of the fraught history of his homeland: first absorbed by the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century, briefly independent from 1918 to 1921, then forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union. The corrected maps are a cartographic protest, a refusal to accept that lines drawn by imperial powers constitute reality.
Installation view. Ph: Fotostudio Jürgen Eheim
This political dimension underlays the exhibition. The early twentieth century was a period of accelerating border-drawing in Europe: nationalist movements hardening into regimes, borders becoming more militarized, the internationalism of the avant-garde increasingly embattled. For Iliazd, who moved from Tbilisi to Petrograd to Paris, severed from the landscapes and communities that had formed him, the portability of his art became an increasing concern and toutité an artistic sensibility to prototyping a universal language of art.
Installation view. Ph: Fotostudio Jürgen Eheim
The centerpiece of the show, the Cabinet Institute, an homage to Duchamp's Boîte-en-valise, resolves this question in a portable museum. The work was conceived as a compact exhibition to carry with oneself, becoming both a statement on creation and a reproduction: as a response to displacement and a refusal to be severed from one’s own work. The relationship between Iliazd and Duchamp, illuminated in the exhibition through previously unseen materials and epistolary exchange, confirms the form of mutualism and mentorship that prevailed among artists of that time. These two minds orbited one another, each finding in the other a confirmation that the most rigorous thinking about art was also the most liberated.
The drawers of the Cabinet, made accessible to be opened by the audience, archive fabric samples designed for Chanel, a poetry typographic proof with its intricate arrangements of movable type, pages from LidantYU fAram (1923), Un Soupçon (1965), and Le Frère Mendiant (1959), illustrated by Picasso, demonstrate a typographic intelligence that is genuinely startling. Remarkably, he used the very machines at Chanel that were employed for decorating fabrics to draw up plans from sketches made on his extensive travels. The same mechanical instruments that produced geometric textile patterns for haute couture were repurposed to reconstruct the floor plans of medieval sacred spaces. The artworks archived in the Cabine are not only the iterations of a curious engineer's mind, who perpetually studies the geometries that govern harmony and beauty, but the expression of a network of friendship with Paul Eluard, Picasso, and Chanel that nurtured Iliazd’s life deeply.
Ilia Zdanevich – Iliazd Poésie de mots inconnus 1949 Publisher 41° Paris Unbound book with text printed in movable type in black and red, illustrated by various artists using different techniques. Courtesy Private Collection
Installation view. Ph: Fotostudio Jürgen Eheim
The bookmaking section showcased in the Vault of the Fondazione is where the transdisciplinarity of toutité becomes most expansive. Iliazd conceived of the book not as a vehicle for text but as an art object in its own right, an intellectual and spatial architecture in which text and image exist in dynamic, mutual dependency. The precision and graphic quality of Iliazd’s architectural studies are of direct inspiration for the meticulous design of his book pages. Architecture was more than an interest for Iliazd, but the conceptual and operational matrix that shaped his bookmaking, elevating the illustrated book into a multisensory and multidimensional experience, comparable to entering and moving through a building. The entire Poésie de mots inconnus (1949), with contributions from Giacometti, Matisse, and Picasso among others, is presented in the show as the collective masterwork it is: an attempt at something like a poetic Esperanto, a language that might connect across borders precisely because it operates below or beyond the national. If the corrected maps were Iliazd’s political statement, this book was his positive proposal that art could be a unifying common language.
The international avant-garde in which Iliazd was inscribed and nurtured was collectively attempting to construct a transnational grammar capable of resisting the enclosures of artistic disciplines and nationalism. The exhibition makes clear that toutité is not simply a historical moment, but an enduring idea. Placed in dialogue with the collection of the Fondazione Antonio Dalle Nogare, a space whose windows open onto the Alps, it demonstrates that this idea, like Iliazd himself, operates beyond boundaries between media and borders between nations.
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