March is the month of Mars, the pater or father of the Roman people and divine parent of Romulus and Remus. And it was in March that Koz Dos painted a mural on a wall of the GRA in the La Rustica area of Rome which in many ways evokes this warrior divinity. In this surreal half-human, half-animal bust – which begins with a head with the muzzle of a half-wildcat, half-wolf – traits of the Old Continent of which Rome was the imperial capital and the New Continent from which Koz Dos originates coexist. For him, the two animal faces represent the union of these two worlds.

We are in the direction of Tivoli here, and this Venezuelan artist hides among the brushstrokes and spraypaint of this richly symbolic piece of work an ancient story which unfolds between the travertine marble of the Tivoli quarries and the relationship between the emperor Hadrian (who built his Villa Adriana in Tivoli) and his lover and companion Antinous, who Adrian had deified after his mysterious death in Egypt in 130 AD.

The marble face of the young Bithynian, which became a canon of male beauty in art, is contained inside the head of this bust, which opens up like an egg or a Russian doll. Moving along the prone body we encounter a couple of woodpeckers, there to celebrate the woodpecker’s role as symbol of Mars, who, together with the she-wolf, fed the twins Romulus and Remus until the shepherd Faustulus found them and took them to safety.

A little further on the artist has painted the mouth of the man inside the triangle which is the symbol of the Trinity. The deity – Koz Dos points out to us – is not an eye that observes or judges the human species for its errors and victories, so it cannot therefore be the symbol of vision or of aesthetics. Vision and aesthetics belong to artists while the divine is a word, because it is above all through spoken and written stories, myths and legends that things are passed down from generation to generation.

The Venezuelan artist is particularly attentive to the teachings of elders, like those handed down to him by his own grandmother. He sees the ancient traditions which come down to us from the ancestral rites of our ancestors who celebrated natural cycles and phenomena as under threat and at risk of being cancelled out by the desire for modernity and the global homologation linked to development – a need that is profoundly changing our culture and which Koz Dos notices in Europe as much as in his native South America. He represents it with the arrows which we jab into our own flesh – a pain we cause to our own species. But here he paints two strong hands breaking the arrows that pierce them, perhaps through the power of knowledge. Continuing through this man-story we find another positive element that the artist has included: the wine, which is there to celebrate life and to drink to the memory of these myths and their stories which we hope will not be lost.