Pier Toffoletti is an artist in motion but his journeys, which take him to every corner of the globe, are not just intercontinental; they are also journeys through time.
At the age of 12 he was given two books on Michelangelo and Cézanne and became fascinated with their work; this sparked a passion for history of art, from the Renaissance masters to Italian post war abstract artist Afro Basaldella.
‘I have always been attracted to the great masters who broke apart the figure to bring out the emotionality of sign and color — emotion at its purest. I feel rooted in the Renaissance, and heir to the great classical authors. My work is an attempt to put my two souls — the figurative and the informal one, in communication.”
The intensity and magic of Pier Toffoletti’s painting arises from the conflict between vision and abstraction which leads him to work on two levels. The first focuses on ordered chaos and beauty represented by the purity and sincerity of a female face. The drama begins when he creates this figurative ideal within an abstract framework which cannot hold it, and the figurative work emerges to overcome the chaos. The face becomes a symbol for the essence of our humanity, says Pier Toffoletti, “nature stripped of all prejudice or disguise.”
As they emerge, the clear-eyed women in Pier Toffoletti’s arresting portraits gaze out through a mass of disarranged brushstrokes formed from paints mixed with powdered marble dust, clay or sand. The classical beauty of these female subjects, the natural textures and the medium used in the creative process make them powerful symbols of both feminine beauty and nature itself; alongside this they are dominated by subtle gradations of black and white tones overlaid with luminous veils of colour which bring an understated yet intense element of modernity to the execution.
Pier Toffoletti was born in 1957 in the Italian province of Udine, and from an early age showed sign of following in the footsteps of his artist grandfather. In 1976 he obtained his diploma as a master of applied arts and shortly afterwards opened his own creative design studio, painting only in his spare time In the early 1990s he made a series of trips to Central and South America and spending time in these spectacular areas of natural beauty changed his life; realising he has become too wrapped up in his work he took a step back from business and began to paint seriously. He launched his professional career as the 1990s drew to a close, exhibiting his works at the Institute of Italian Culture in Tokyo in 1999 and at Palazzo Zenobio in Venice in 2002.
In 2005 Pier Toffoletti held his first solo show at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Arezzo. This was a resounding success, and since then he has taken part in over 200 solo and collective events in museums, galleries and public institutions in Europe, the USA and Japan. His most recent exhibitions in 2021 were at the 17th Architecture Biennial in Venice as part of the “Senza terra- Pomerio” project, and a solo show in Portugal at the Centrum Sete Sois Sete Luas.
