Edith Torony, Painter of Enough Spaces to Interest a Physicist
Saatchi Art recently focused on a group of paintings they found notable in 2020. I found myself reading down through them with a sigh. When I saw Edith Torony’s work I stopped. “what matters most is how well you walk through the fire” presents a crammed canvas. No ground line, no overarching sky, no logical left or right. What I mean is a viewer cannot establish a point of view. The painter refuses to take one.
Is there a virtual wall which aligns the board that protrudes, the circus hoop hanging in air, the wall or two shown upper right and the pile of mega-dice to the left, the partial anime face? Because the unrealistic fires, the whirly pinwheel and other details make me want to move mentally to the left to accommodate them.
I saw in a museum once — I think in Cleveland — a sign on the floor where they deemed it best for taking selfies. Eh?
Torony has a brain that I’d love to roam around in. This truly flat depiction of multiple viewpoints, not to mention relative scales, teases your logic-loving brain.
Of course I may read her painting all wrong. That can happen when you’re outside a creative cranium. What can also happen is a shrug. I love this art whatever it is.
A few more so you get a real taste of her work.
You can see the repeated occurrence of stripes, of yellow and a pale blue. Note on Heaven & Earth VI that the background is quite blurred with detail layered on top. Not so on the others. The painter keeps moving our point of view. Here’s a universe where anything goes.
This is miles different from my art but the ideal of anything fits suits us both.
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Torony is Romainian. To my ignorant American ears I hear brutal heinous dictators. But I read Romania is long past that. And the fanciful work of Edith Torony says nothing about oppression and misery. Rather her focus is on the stuff we humans have cast off like used Kleenex. Packaging in its abundant difference, flashy buy me lures with no staying power. You’ve spent your money? The lure’s defunct. Squashed cans, the cellophane that binds three paper towel rolls into one price tag, the silvered crinkly bag your favorite chips came in.
Science magazine recently had the headline Human “stuff” now outweighs all life on Earth.” Torony isn’t nuts — this is yet another turning point for our planet which has been accumulating disastrous firsts for some time now. How this leads her to her compositions is mysterious to me.
She is an English-as-a-second-language person yet bravely goes for paragraphs of explanation about her various studies. Not a simple individual, not a simple line of reasoning.
“My work is an ode to chaos and reconstruction, to re-composition, to the reduction of everything to a recycled playground.”
This and photo below via Torony page on Singulart.
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Singulart Edith Torony with artist’s photo