Empreintes de pinceau no. 50 répétées à intervalles réguliers (30 cm), 1979

About the Work

Niele Toroni demonstrates in his pictures the controlled serial application of a painterly gesture. The impression of a five-centimetre-wide paintbrush is positioned on the canvas at regular, thirty-centimetre intervals. The painterly action, however, expresses not the subject of artistic inspiration, but simply the texture of the paintbrush. Everything we have expected to find in an abstract painting since American Expressionism is subverted in Toroni's works. He distances himself from the concept of being an artist in the sense of the usual understanding of painting as a subjective action. Even so, what we are dealing with here is painting, perhaps in its purest form.