Toby Ziegler

The Grand Cause

2006
Oil, pencil and gold leaf on canvas
210 x 242.5 cm

Toby Ziegler’s paintings and sculptures reflect a personal negotiation with the synthetic and the exotic. Fabricating his images on a computer, traditional motifs such as landscapes, still-lifes, and cultural artefacts are removed from the familiarity of popular consciousness and reconfigured as templates of abstracted information. Translated into a purist language of repetitive geometric patterns, the romantic associations Ziegler’s subjects are recomposed as sublime fields, incorporating references to virtual reality, Islamic mosaics, and 60s trippy pop.

In his paintings, Ziegler carefully reproduces these digitised models entirely by hand; each painstakingly rendered shape reveals tell-tale traces of the artist’s intervention, marking its space as an individual point of contemplation. Corrupting the consummate perfection of mechanical aesthetics with the intimacy of human fallibility, Ziegler develops a unique position to engage with the act of painting in the contemporary world.

Divorcing his subjects from the weight of their historical context, Ziegler’s fragmented motifs offer virgin terrains for painterly degeneration. In Designated For Leisure, this contradiction between the value of technological precision and its degradation through imperfect translation are reinforced through the painting’s overwhelming scale and holograph-like surface. Composed on reflective industrial fabric, the painting’s surface shifts and transforms when viewed from different angles, revealing the landscape within as a chimera of light and perspective.

In the Grand Cause, Ziegler’s abstracted sunset subverts the rigidity of graphic design with the spontaneity of painterly expression. Vying between attenuate detail and intuitive mark-making, the perfunctory qualities of his repetitive patterning evolve as personalised statements of authenticity and affectation. Defiling the gold leaf surface with materiality of paint, Ziegler capitalises on the rich and luxurious quality of his ground to draw connotations to beauty and the grotesque.