Press Release

Niele Toroni was born in Muralto-Locarno, Switzerland, in 1937, and has lived in Paris since 1959.

In 1966 he started the practice which he calls « Travail-Peinture » and which entails marking a surface with imprints of a n° 50 paintbrush at regular 30-cm intervals.

His “Travail-Peinture” was first publicly shown at the 1967 Salon de la Jeune Peinture in Paris ( BMPT).

For over forty years Toroni has been executing his brush imprints tirelessly on diverse, usually white, surfaces: canvas, paper, oil cloth, walls, and floors.

This apparent renouncement of the idea of creation must not hide what constitutes Toroni’s essential proposition, namely that the imprints are never identical. Stating that Toroni’s work is always the same, “means that one does not go beyond the level of its utterance, that one fails to envisage it in its fuller display, that one does not see”.

In 2005 at Galerie Greta Meert, he created an installation (works on canvas and direct interventions) based on Arthur Rimbaud’s poem « Vowels “ : I Red, A Black, U Green.

This is Niele Toroni’s second solo exhibition Galerie Greta Meert