Though Tony Toscani is a Brooklyn-dependent painter the form of isolation and dissociative malaise his paintings depict will be common to all. Toscani is a painter of our modern-day problem: the disconnection wrought by the age of hyperconnectivity. Most generally his paintings depict a single, solitary determine in the most paired down options: a slab to show a table, a blue square to simulate a window. Sometimes a further figure appears but never do two pairs of eyes actually satisfy, by no means does nearly anything that resembles relationship take care of between the figures. Toscani draws out the emotional existence of his subjects to make a temper so pervasive it turns into a type of ambiance you could cut with a knife.
The blank faces of his figures call to thoughts the vacuous expressions of Modigiliani’s subjects and in his treatment method of the physique, in which limbs are geometricized to extended tubular volumes, Toscani recollects Bauhaus learn Oskar Schlemmer’s paintings (i.e. ‘Bauhaus Stairway’, 1932)—or even his well-known Triadic Ballet—in which bodies are rendered as a series of modular geometric areas. Another 20th century figure looms big listed here: Picasso, particularly the paintings of his classical period of time.” Take ‘The Pipes of Pan’ (1923), for instance. Toscani shares in the palette—brilliant blues and sandy hues—and rotund modeling and robustness of the bodies of several of Picasso’s paintings of the time period. Recognize also the reminiscently stark environment: sharp planes in opposition to swaths of sky.
Art historic resonances apart, Toscani’s subject matter is entirely contemporary—even futuristic. In a current interview with Juxtapoz magazine the artist remarked: “Our existing condition of melancholy and apathy is my biggest affect.” Of the shrunken heads in his paintings, he stated that this formal conceit introduced on by the results of the pandemic. “People started off making use of their consciousness a good deal much less and their bodies a good deal a lot more because they nevertheless had to go on doing ordinary points in their day to day lifestyle, like likely to the rest room, having, operating, and sleeping. So, to me, it really is sort of like human evolution in 2000 a long time, what we would all finish up looking like,” he claims.
Toscani’s figures sit weighty in these paintings, achingly earth-sure as if sentenced to reside right here in serious isolation and angst. He is specifically adept at conveying weight—psychic, psychological and actual physical fat. In ‘The Monument’ (2022), two figures regard 1 of their have: a girl whose proportions have grown to these kinds of an extreme that her corpulence melds with the landmass powering her. Upending the custom of monuments—sculptural objects that commemorate heroic acts—here the determine props her head up with her hand lazily, sleepily. Toscani has erected a monument in praise of boredom, a consecration of the every day. —Danny Kopel
