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Lot Essay
'These are fingerprints although here it is the paintbrush that leaves its shape. What interests me is that I don't invent a form, it's not a square, it's not a circle. Each stain is different' (N. Toroni, interview for Color Chart: Footage of Niele Toroni painting interventions, New York, Museum of Modern Art, http:/www.moma.org/explore/multimedia videos/10/256, accessed August 4, 2011)
The delicate, refined aesthetic of the Swiss born artist Niele Toroni was developed as a reaction to the post-war dominance of Abstract Expressionism. Toroni belongs to a generation of European painters who, railing against the expressive abstract styles of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and other members of the New York School, began to search for a form of painting which abandoned the notion of style altogether and sought to reduce the act of painting to a sign of itself. Building on his earlier work which consisted of pieces of linoleum marked out with a rhomboid grid, he began to explore the idea of reducing this motif to a single mark made by a paint-laden brushstroke.
Consequently these Imprints became the sole motif of his work and were executed on a variety of surfaces with extreme precision and grace. In each of these works Toroni uses a compass to indicate its precise position, then, using a no. 50 paint-brush, he places a mark on the surface using both sides of a loaded paintbrush at regular intervals of 300 mm. Each of these deposits varies ever-so-slightly from the next, depending on the amount of pressure exerted by Toroni with each application of the brush. Thus, these marks become individual signs of the artist's process, each minutely different from the next, as he himself noted 'These are fingerprints although here it is the paintbrush that leaves its shape. What interests me is that I don't invent a form, it's not a square, it's not a circle. Each stain is different' (N. Toroni, interview for Color Chart: Footage of Niele Toroni painting interventions New York, Museum of Modern Art, http:/www.moma.org/explore/multimedia videos/10/256, accessed August 4, 2011).
The delicate, refined aesthetic of the Swiss born artist Niele Toroni was developed as a reaction to the post-war dominance of Abstract Expressionism. Toroni belongs to a generation of European painters who, railing against the expressive abstract styles of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and other members of the New York School, began to search for a form of painting which abandoned the notion of style altogether and sought to reduce the act of painting to a sign of itself. Building on his earlier work which consisted of pieces of linoleum marked out with a rhomboid grid, he began to explore the idea of reducing this motif to a single mark made by a paint-laden brushstroke.
Consequently these Imprints became the sole motif of his work and were executed on a variety of surfaces with extreme precision and grace. In each of these works Toroni uses a compass to indicate its precise position, then, using a no. 50 paint-brush, he places a mark on the surface using both sides of a loaded paintbrush at regular intervals of 300 mm. Each of these deposits varies ever-so-slightly from the next, depending on the amount of pressure exerted by Toroni with each application of the brush. Thus, these marks become individual signs of the artist's process, each minutely different from the next, as he himself noted 'These are fingerprints although here it is the paintbrush that leaves its shape. What interests me is that I don't invent a form, it's not a square, it's not a circle. Each stain is different' (N. Toroni, interview for Color Chart: Footage of Niele Toroni painting interventions New York, Museum of Modern Art, http:/www.moma.org/explore/multimedia videos/10/256, accessed August 4, 2011).