Niele Toroni

“If I had to sum up Niele Toroni in one word, without hesitation that word would be ‘loyalty’. Loyalty in friendship, for I have had the joy of sharing his artistic adventure and epicurean side for more than thirty years. And loyalty in his work, because I know no other artist who has followed the same path without ever deviating from his goal.” Yvon Lambert, Œuvres sur papier et photographies, La Collection Yvon Lambert dialogue avec des artistes contemporains, Yokohama Museum of Art, 1998

The fourth volume of the Lambert Collection art book series had to be devoted to Niele Toroni and Yvon Lambert, such is the strength of the relationship between the collector and the artist. Their relationship began back in 1970 when Toroni presented his first exhibition at the gallery, and continues through 2021, when the Lambert Collection will be exhibiting its full catalogue of the artist’s work, spotlighting two works produced in situ for the museum opening in 2000, composed of a series of paintings on paper, tracing paper, canvas, wood, and even on a school blackboard. This book of the exhibition contains gallery views as well as an interview between Niele Toroni and Yvon Lambert.

For more than fifty years, Niele Toroni has been developing a subversive and radical vision of the pictorial act. As early as 1966, his method had already begun to take shape, using a brush no.50 to print repetitive brushstrokes at regular 30-cm intervals. This work was presented for the first time in 1967, beside Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset and Michel Parmentier, in the pop-up exhibition “Manifestation I” at the 18th Young Painter’s Fair at Paris’s Museum of Modern Art.

The “work/painting” – as the painter calls it – consists of a reproducing a single, minimal, systematic gesture, “which is never the same”. The work/painting has no story to tell and no underlying message to convey. What matters is what you see. The works “reboot” our visual experience. Changing viewers’ perceptions is Niele Toroni’s great ambition; for him, painting means “learning to see again”.