Embracing melancholia as a condition fertile with diachronic ambivalence, Tony Toscani's latest exhibition From Safety To Where? at Stems, Paris, presents a collective portraiture reflecting the complexities of contemporary living and conveys how the indulgence of dwelling is intrinsic to the human psyche.
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 Traveller.
Reminiscent of the classic gravedigger scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the sullen figure resting a hand upon his prophetic skull is as phantasmagoric as the apparition of Hamlet’s dead father. The Time Traveller, a desiring subject trapped in space with a relation to death echoes the temporal dislocation of the anti hero of literature who declares ’Time is out of joint’ when forced to confront the negotiation of his own redundancy and prospective demise after witnessing his father’s ghost.
Familiar with the existential dwell Toscani’s figures conjure, their disproportionately composed appendages cast in angular forms encompass a psychosomatic foreignness consequential of a fanatically occupied mind. Physically morphed by melancholic neurosis, the protruding shoulder blade in Summer Wonder resigns the figure to a discomfort of tender awkwardness, a body at odds with its complicit self, akin to the elongated limbs of the figure portrayed in Boy In The Corner, appear amplified in contrast to their dwarfed heads depicting a pictorial testament to overthinking.
Where the creases of tightly fitting clothing suffocating the torso and major hinge joints of the figure in The Time Traveller emphasise a dormancy from involuntary movement, and the loosely sagging shirt portrayed in Summer Wonder serves to exaggerate the languor expressed by the figure’s disposition, the psychedelic design of the jumper pictured in Boy In The Corner conflates the periphery of surrealism evolutionised in Apathy And The Lonely Child and Colossus And The Lonely Child. Confronting a looming apathy and colossal feelings of anxiety that manifest as giants in a mythical land, the lonely boy circumvents the mundane by engaging the power of imagination to create other worlds.
Experiencing pleasure through pain as a fundamental structure of our being, Toscani neutralises these dualities with a eloquence that channels a frequency reminiscent of a reverberating gong that acquaints static to the sound of thinking. Where the expression of serenity in The Safe Return emotes the intensity of bonding and relief; The stiffened interphalangeal joints of the hand dominating Debating Art emphasising the figure’s gaze of concentration, captures how such discussions can be pleasurably thought provoking despite the frustration conjured to articulate subjectivities.
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 that manifests the phantasmagoric of quotidian life, reminds us of the androgynous zone of productivity existential contemplation occupies as a prolific surrogacy for art making. —Charlotte Norwood for Stems
