I deal with something that exists but represents nothing.
In all, my purpose is to leave my work closer to the moment, where the violence of the artwork happens. Here I refer more to the violent way of making the truth visible and less to the possibly violent interpretations of the image itself. Francis Bacon talks about the “brutality of the fact”. And how what is true (/materiality) comes to affect us as beings in a more direct way. As the presence and the act itself are the things that define my work, my job has lately been to challenge the conceptual side of my practice. With a heavy process, I’ll bring conceptuality closer to aesthetics and together with it.
I am trying to find myself again and again with my each artwork. I work with more than one medium (the remains of dead animals, blood, metals, the presence/traces left by a human or an animal etc.) which are all connected by the idea of the duality of life. They all manifest the fact that all seeming opposites exist only because of each other.
Read Toni R. Toivonen’s exhibition blog here.
tonirtoivonen@gmail.com