Niele Toroni

The work

Pinzell Mark No. 50 at 30 cm Intervals
1994
79.8 x 51.7 cm
Acrylic on photograph

This work by Niele Toroni at the Stämpfli Foundation consists of a photograph showing a portion of the artist’s previous exhibition, used as a support for a new painting.
It consists of five almost square black marks made with black paint, the result of applying a size 50 brush to the surface of the photograph. They are arranged like the five points on a die, spaced 30 cm apart.
In absolutely every work throughout his artistic career, Toroni has used a size 50 brush to repeat traces, identical but never identical, and spaced 30 cm apart.
Toroni reduces painting to a minimum, retaining only the smallest gesture and the smallest essential elements: pigment, brush, and the gesture of the brushstroke, in a desire for almost total abstraction. Subject matter and technique have disappeared, with the aim of creating a kind of zero degree of painting.

The artist

(Locarno-Muralto, Switzerland, 1937)

Toroni was one of the founders of the BMPT collective in 1966, the initials of Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset (also present in this Foundation’s collection), Michel Parmentier, and Toroni himself.
BMPT was a minimalist group that questioned fundamental ideas such as creative authorship. BMPT experimented with neutral compositions and repetitive patterns, rejecting the historical aesthetic foundations and the spectacular nature of the new avant-garde movements. They were in search of a “zero point” of painting and situating it at an initial moment of artistic reflection, going beyond any form of figuration, subjectivity, or symbolism.