Reviews & Exhibition Texts | Charlotte Norwood

Embracing the universal murmur of melancholy as a condition fertile with diachronic ambivalence and exploring how the indulgence of dwelling is intrinsic to the human psyche, Tony Toscani’s latest exhibition From Safety To Where? at Stems, Paris, investigates the complexities of contemporary living through a collective portraiture laced with a tenderness of solace.

Ubiquitously pervading the spectrum of daily life, the omnipresence of melancholy dwells throughout negotiations on subjectivity depicted in Debating Art and evokes a profound sense of bonding that shrouds communal acts of embrace in The Safe Return, to ultimately compound reflective moments of solitude conveying an aesthetic threshold of existential contemplation that circulate an acquisition into mortality manifested in The Time Traveler.

Reminiscent of the classic gravedigger scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the sullen figure resting a hand upon his prophetic skull appears as phantasmagoric as the apparition of Hamlet’s dead father. The Time Traveler, a desiring subject trapped in space with a relation to death, echoes the temporal dislocation the antihero of literature endures when the negotiation of his own redundancy and prospective demise prompts the declaration ‘time is out of joint’ in wake of his father’s ghost. If melancholia is experienced as a time unmeasured, there’s a sensation throughout the exhibition of time compressed, a gentle now held in strange suspension, channeling a subconscious frequency akin to the endless reverberation of a gong that equates the gentle persistence of static to the sound of thinking.

Capturing the subconscious despondency we evince when engaging in solitary activities, Toscani recruits us as unintentional participants in an anthropological exercise to reveal a blind spot of self recognition we only discern in others. Contemporaneously fixated by the illusive world of social media in effort to circumvent the mundane, the exhibition aestheticises a collective expression of apathetic scrollers, by turning the camera around to expose the emotional and practical deficiency these platforms cultivate despite being deployed as tools for connectivity. In the introduction to the 1995 reissue of the 1973 novel Crash, J.G. Ballard discusses the balance between fiction and reality. ‘We live,’ he writes, ‘in a world ruled by fictions of every kind…the writer’s (artist’s) task is to invent the reality’.

Uniting individual existence by a singular sensation From Safety To Where? reminds us of our collective humanity, coalescing the subliminal repercussions of the digital age by the medium of painting; a mediative act secluded from the complexities of contemporary living. If the skull prompts Hamlet to question the vanity of life in the 17th century then Toscani’s uneasy mood of inattentiveness renders an authentic depiction of quotidian experience antithetical to the veneer of performativity and self promotion dominating the 21st.

Although familiar with the existential dwell Toscani’s figures conjure, their disproportionately composed appendages cast in angular forms cohere a psychosomatic foreignness with otherworldly mysticism. The protruding shoulder blade in Summer Wonder resigns the figure to a discomfort of tender peculiarity, a transcendental body at odds with its complicit self, analogous to the elongated limbs of the figures portrayed in The Time Traveler and Boy In The Corner, appear further accentuated in contrast to their poignantly dwarfed heads, bestowing a pictorial testament to a co-existence between the despondency of daily life and the world of inventiveness we escape to in order to elude the mundane.

Where the creases in tightly fitted clothing of The Time Traveler emphasise a suffocating dormancy from involuntary movement, and the slouching shirt portrayed in Summer Wonder exaggerates the languor expressed by the figure’s disposition, their triangular shaped faces coincide with that of the giant in Apathy And The Lonely Child. Dwelling under a sky portrayed through the windows of rooms they are confined by, the giant adorns a psychedelically designed jumper similar to Boy In The Corner, his cobalt blue trousers synchronised with those of the lonely child, conflating the metamorphosis of their bodies and preoccupation of mind with an amplification of surrealism encompassing the world of fantasy the curious boy encounters.

Confronting a looming apathy and colossal feelings of trepidation that manifest as giants in Apathy And The Lonely Child and Colossus And The Lonely Child, the boy opposes an emotional suppression dominating the monotony of daily life by an enchantment of the observant creatures residing in the mythical realm Toscani concocts by experimenting with an escalation of scale. Conveying an inquisitive desire to decipher the other recalls the psychological reckoning in anthropological history conjured by Levi Strauss, the last practitioner and destroyer of the classical paradigm. Collapsing the polarities of the field vs. the home-base and the observed vs. observer, the mystic realm and the surveyance of foreign cultures burgeoning within it were no longer distinguished by a place of designation but understood to be rooted in the human psyche, consequently deeming the field an academic construction of the outside, dissolving the concept of a subject looking in and rendering the early 20th century anthropologist position untenable. If the Boy In The Corner simultaneously embodies the giant and the lonely child, then Toscani, like Strauss, collapses the distinction between fantasy and reality, redirecting the surveyance towards the inversion of foreignness, otherness and the unknown embedded within the human condition collectively.

Exhibition Text for From Safety To Where? by Tony Toscani at Stems, 2024, Paris, FR

Harmonising the figures by reciprocal characteristics, notable features and clothing, From Safety To Where? subjects the protagonists to incorporate the other through an interchangeable matrix of dimension, gesture, scenario and environment, orchestrating an inclusive web of shared experiences and perspectives united by a mutual and native texture of embodiment.

Through the use of scale, the giant in Colossus And The Lonely Child - a nod to 'The Colossus' by Sylvia Plath and testament to the poet’s impact on Toscani’s thinking - projects the towering supremacy of the Ancient Greek statue in the poem the lonely child appears too subordinate to challenge, yet manifesting the mythology of the statue as a man astride two islands, Colossus opposes a looming apathy by embodying the child through a synchronising jumper and hairstyle, internalising Plath's admission of defeat and analysis of her own impotence, augmenting a sensation of loneliness which in addition to describing the child, has the potential to linger during the time spent alone poets and artists require to work.

Comparatively, the figure on the left depicted in Debating Art, who assumes both positions of the child by a colour correlation of trousers to those in Apathy And The Lonely Child and nickel grey jumper in Colossus And The Lonely Child, meta fictionally suggests that the art they are conferring are the paintings themselves, conceived by the figure as self portraits confronting the colossal task to paint with regard to art history and the apathy manifested by anxieties surrounding a fear of failure to produce them. If Boy In The Corner and the figure depicted in Debating Art envision confronting apathy, then like foreignness and otherness intra-Levi Strauss and the amalgamation of fantasy and reality, apathy seeps through the porous veil of the psyche to inspire daydreams, paintings and other creative pursuits to imply we are citizens of melancholy unconsciously.

Confined to interior spaces that appear private yet un-confessionally void of personality, the figures cohere to colour gradients of beige backgrounds adorning a palette of neutral greys and silvers or a spectrum of earthy greens and dull golds adhering to a tonal mutability of exterior environments reminiscent of the repetitive, non descriptive landscapes characters move through in video games. Adopting a chameleon like ghostly presence accentuated in The Safe Return, the figures cast a united form imitating the shape of the landscape whilst the creases in clothing blend with the shadows that delineate the hills behind, a transcendence punctuated in Colossus And The Lonely Child whereby the lower body of the giant submerges into the ground camouflaged by the black abyss of his own phantom. Recalling the conception of melancholy in the Middle Ages, melacholame was conceived to manifest in the physical matter of black bile conjured in the stomach, a phenomena now understood by psychoanalysts as the alien incorporated by the subject as an outsider on the inside that Michel de Certeau and post-structuralist anthropologists after Strauss observed and analysed within the subject of everyday civilians.

As the landscapes are void of specificity, detail orientation and unlocalised to a particular geography or time period, coined with the disavowal of any explicit contextual reference that would otherwise demarcate hierarchy and segregation distracting from the emphasis of dwelling as a singularity, Toscani evokes a democratic and universal notion of melancholy, welcoming the viewer to project a spectrum of subjectivities provoking the sensation, notably captured by the shadow lingering on the wall behind the Boy In The Corner epitomising a phantom of the mind that has fundamentally haunted the human psyche for centuries. When it comes to the realm of objects shadow is always in reciprocity with light, yet imperceivable by the figure in the painting, the transient form equates the potent mutability of the unknown with a gentle exaltation of mystery.

If we fundamentally experience pleasure through pain as essential to the structure of our being, Toscani synchronises these dualities as a site of emotional productivity with intuitive comprehension. Accentuating the figure’s concentrated gaze, the stiffened interphalangeal joints of the hand dominating Debating Art captures how such discussions can be pleasurably thought provoking despite the frustration conjured to grapple the articulation of subjectivities. Where the figures in The Safe Return evoke an intensity of relief uniting in sorrow and the glum confrontation with death as experienced by The Time Traveler grants curiosity to contemplate the possibility of an afterlife, then like the hunched disposition of the protagonists, we derive satisfaction in the tendency to slouch although such positions inflict damage to our posture and take pleasure in the creation of our fantasies despite conjuring such worlds to circumvent tedium. If apathy dwells within the psyche, so does the creative agency to embrace the intuitive drive existential thinking offers as a fertile ground for innovation.

Recalling the haunted anti heroes of literature or the melancholic neurosis of poets and musicians such as Sylvia Plath and Joy Division - the latter informing the exhibition title by way of their track ‘From Safety To Where?’ - Toscani, a blue conceptualist manifesting the phantasmagoric in quotidian life, reminds us of the androgynous zone of productivity melancholia occupies as a prolific surrogacy for art making. Like Hamlet, we need time to be out of joint or to engage with the posthumous sorrow of Plath who perceives the world to beat like a slack drum and absorb the dark cavernous sound of Joy Division reflecting the mindset of Manchester in the late 70’s as a crumbling industrial city within a dystopian environment to foster the sense of alienation with the collective essence of our being and gain articulation of existentialism in the wider context of cultural history. Adrift from the larger continent of human experience, yet intrinsic to the very act of being alive, From Safety to Where? seeks value in solitude, championing desire, sadness and boredom with lyrical contingency.