…the laments are memory...

Toby Ziegler’s …the laments are memory… (2009) is a beautiful example of the artist’s hauntingly digitised, quasi-figurative style. Beginning with art historical paintings, Ziegler builds complex three-dimensional tableaux on computer-aided design software, introducing planes of pattern that intersect the work and give the image a strangely unnatural sense of depth; Ziegler uses these scenes as models for his painting, denaturing them further by removing the details of his forms, leaving only geometric outlines filled by curiously empty, juxtaposed landscapes or fields of abstraction. Here, Ziegler’s work takes as its source Jan Gossaert’s 1525 painting Adam and Eve, only where the figures once stood there now appears an eerily placid cloud formation, framed by seemingly self-regenerating planes of green circles that recede into the painting at fluctuating gradients of perspective; over this, Ziegler has painted an indeterminate organic form in rich muddy browns. As these layers of pattern and shadow overlap in Ziegler’s composition they take on an illuminated translucence, as light seems to spill across the multiple dimensions of the painting from the painting’s centre, creating the sense of an immersive, impossible physical depth. Gradually wearing away the visual information of his sources, Ziegler’s process generates new ways of depicting space on his canvas, both reducing compositional perspective to geometric flatness and at the same time using digital technology to augment and multiply the dimensions of space represented on the canvas.