Niele Toroni | Art in America
Jul 16 2015
This is the first institutional solo show in New York for 78-year-old Niele Toroni—the “T” in BMPT. (The other members of the short-lived radical collective, established in 1966, included Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset and Michel Parmentier.) The elegant exhibition surveys some 50 years of Toroni’s unchanging conceptual painting method, described succinctly in the press release as “imprints of a no. 50 brush repeated at regular intervals of 30 cm.” Toroni’s marks cover a series of canvases (from 1987), a scroll-like sheet of waxed canvas (1968), colorful paper cut into irregular geometric forms (2000), letter-size pages (2014), and elements of the Swiss Institute itself. This last series, titled “Interventions,” is the most important. By emphasizing the act of markmaking over its painterly support, Toroni helped erase the barrier between work and the gallery, an artistic spur to the last half-century of institutional critique.