Toby Ziegler: ESCAPISM

Toby Ziegler (b. 1972) brings together motifs derived from a wide range of sources, including photographs of the Freud family, Spanish still-life paintings, Dutch Old Masters and Nineteenth Century landscape paintings. He uses the computer to generate new forms and pictorial spaces, playing with facetted structures for his sculptures and manipulating layers of pattern for his two dimensional works. The physical realisation of these digital forms allows mistakes and idiosyncrasies to creep into the rigorous schematic process and to erase the clear distinction between figuration and abstraction. Ziegler revels in the slippages between the virtual and the actual, and furthermore in the very physical acts of decomposing, distorting, and damaging the materials. While Ziegler provides the viewer with some access to follow his path he intentionally leaves room for personal interpretation.

‘As a process, the enlargement of pixelated, discoloured images seems almost automatic in Ziegler – as if no new voice could be imparted to an image before it had passed through a singular neutralising filter. [...] The metal ensures a very specific form of paint adhesion and drying; it retains the trace of every brushstroke, whose nuances stand out at each transition. [...] Yet these operations would mean nothing without a further process, one that comes into effect after the first layer of paint has been painstakingly laid down. Of course, it is thought through from the start with the aid of a computer used to elaborate the composition. This second stage can be perceived as a kind of sabotage – though without it the painting would not be complete. Ziegler now sprays the painting, authoritatively superimposing a pattern over the motif.’

J.M. Gallais, in Toby Ziegler: Borderline Something, Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2013