Niele Toroni exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris

Maybe monogamy is a type of monomania in which the obsession of daily rite becomes synonymous with its precious and precise handling. Tender obsession, eternal love. The repetition of action (wake up, nudge the body beside you, make a cup of coffee, fuck while thinking about what to do with your day) manifests as fastened affect on a symbol of passion, all Balzac tying the knot, or elsewhere a visible gesture stuck in a relationship of necessity, as René Deziot has remarked, and in a “structural coherence” of everything involved in production. Niele Toroni reinterprets this ’til death do us part-ideology into marks made with a no. 50 size brush, each carefully placed at a comfortable, yet intimate distance of 30 cm apart. It’s a marriage of mind and material that is soon to celebrate a gold anniversary, yet seems still to be working hard at convincing us that the institution (of painting, that penultimate authority) is not dead, not dying, not even remotely submitting to dalliances with other mediums or means of reproduction. Well, if you once read your vows with hands pledged over an issue of October magazine, you’ve committed to a power higher than God, namely, that of modernity itself, where freedom (attn.: millennials) was found in commitment, that paradoxically liberating force where mind could wander in detail, not distraction.

Text and photo Sabrina Tarasoff