"Niele Toroni proceeds with his highly personal and disciplined art with a degree of consistency and clarity going all the way back to 1967, when he started using a size 50 (50mm) brush to make this gesture of pictorial "impressions" at a regular distance of thirty centimetres from each other, both in height and in width. The support he uses for his action may be a canvas, a wall, a sheet of paper, or the ground. In its marking and defining, his time image feeds on the movement of a visual progression and multiplication. In Toroni's art, the module/impression is the sequential freeze frame of a continuous narrative. It is the equal that is only apparently identical to itself in its repetition: the component of the painter's gesture brings about a variable pressure in the force applied by hand, which is enough to make each individual impression unique in its seriality. In its apparent reduction to the essentials, in terms of instrument-colour-image, Toroni is actually bringing about his greatest ambition, which is to give material form in pure painting to the synecdoche of the entire Universe.
What might appear as a purely conceptual and aesthetic act, as a cold, detached work by the artist actually means for Toroni the greatest possible emotional involvement. It means a feeling of pietas for the human world."
- Francesco Castellani
"Repetition forms the basis of life, our heart always beats the same way and it is precisely its repetitive beat that ensures our life."
- Niele Toroni
Photographs of a permanent installation at
A Arte Invernizze, Milan
