Embracing melancholia as a situation fertile with diachronic ambivalence, Tony Toscani’s newest exhibition From Security To The place? at Stems, Paris, presents a collective portraiture reflecting the complexities of up to date dwelling and conveys how the indulgence of dwelling is intrinsic to the human psyche.
Ubiquitously pervading the spectrum of every day life, the omnipresence of melancholy dwells all through negotiations on subjectivity depicted in Debating Artwork and evokes a profound sense of bonding that shrouds communal acts of embrace in The Secure Return, to in the end compound reflective moments of solitude, conveying an aesthetic threshold of existential contemplation that flow into an acquisition into mortality manifested in The Time Traveller.
Paying homage to the basic gravedigger scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the sullen determine resting a hand upon his prophetic cranium is as phantasmagoric because the apparition of Hamlet’s lifeless father. The Time Traveller, a wanting topic trapped in area with a relation to loss of life echoes the temporal dislocation of the anti hero of literature who declares ’Time is out of joint’ when compelled to confront the negotiation of his personal redundancy and potential demise after witnessing his father’s ghost.
Conversant in the existential dwell Toscani’s figures conjure, their disproportionately composed appendages solid in angular kinds embody a psychosomatic foreignness consequential of a fanatically occupied thoughts. Bodily morphed by melancholic neurosis, the protruding shoulder blade in Summer time Marvel resigns the determine to a discomfort of tender awkwardness, a physique at odds with its complicit self, akin to the elongated limbs of the determine portrayed in Boy In The Nook, seem amplified in distinction to their dwarfed heads depicting a pictorial testomony to overthinking.
The place the creases of tightly becoming clothes suffocating the torso and main hinge joints of the determine in The Time Traveller emphasise a dormancy from involuntary motion, and the loosely sagging shirt portrayed in Summer time Marvel serves to magnify the languor expressed by the determine’s disposition, the psychedelic design of the jumper pictured in Boy In The Nook conflates the periphery of surrealism evolutionised in Apathy And The Lonely Youngster and Colossus And The Lonely Youngster. Confronting a looming apathy and colossal emotions of hysteria that manifest as giants in a legendary land, the lonely boy circumvents the mundane by participating the ability of creativeness to create different worlds.
Experiencing pleasure by means of ache as a elementary construction of our being, Toscani neutralises these dualities with a eloquence that channels a frequency harking back to a reverberating gong that acquaints static to the sound of considering. The place the expression of serenity in The Secure Return emotes the depth of bonding and aid; The stiffened interphalangeal joints of the hand dominating Debating Artwork emphasising the determine’s gaze of focus, captures how such discussions will be pleasurably thought upsetting regardless of the frustration conjured to articulate subjectivities.
Recalling the haunted anti heroes of literature or the melancholic neurosis of poets and musicians resembling Sylvia Plath and Pleasure Division – the latter informing the exhibition title by means of their monitor ‘From security to the place?’ – Toscani, a blue conceptualist that manifests the phantasmagoric of quotidian life, reminds us of the androgynous zone of productiveness existential contemplation occupies as a prolific surrogacy for artwork making. —Charlotte Norwood for Stems