31 July 2026
Visited Tobias's studio ahead of our upcoming conversation for the podcast and got to spend some time with the body of work he has been developing (he showed me nine paintings made over what I believe he said was the past eight or nine months). It's excellent, inspiring work, so I'm getting some notes down here.
Firstly, gridding; these paintings establish a conversation with gridding that isn't so much a system as it is an ongoing set of suggestions around the reactions a system might imply. A—let's say roughly nine—quadrant grid is repeatedly alluded to and yet never exists as a graspable solid framework. Even in one work where the quadrants are quite forward, hard-edged, and visible, their form-defining borderlines tilt, skew, echo, and overlap such that the effect is something like pieces of paper strewn around a flat surface or windows containing ranges of seasonal or emotional states. In fact, (and I know I'm prone to bringing him up), I sense something of Jasper Johns's Seasons (1987) etching and aquatint works (and the totality of his work more broadly speaking) in these paintings in that form seems to be mostly utilized and dilated to open the door for focus to constantly shift and for something else to appear on the surface. And that something else might hint at locatable subjects, (in working titles and early associative thoughts, Tobias mentioned words like “reservoir” and “diesel,” and I do sense a kind of lingering omnipotent noxiousness), but ultimately passes them by as it moves around in search of new formal relationships to unpack. It's not purely formal work, but it understands its way in.
Tobias mentioned Manet with regard to his ability to deploy structures around figures that create a certain leeway for perhaps more experimental whims or marks to feel justified within those structures, and I get what he means while looking at his work (although he also spoke of confronting limitations, and I think Manet's were ultimately the cause of some of his weirder and more spatially confounding and therefore more timeless paintings). But in Tobias's case, as I've already alluded to, I think his freedom unlocks from manipulating the structure itself. And therein lies a sort of twisting of subject into content and back again that makes the work generative and fresh. In paintings beyond the aforementioned most delineated one, the grid collapses, rotates, curls, disintegrates, compresses, duplicates, and glitches. In these ways, one of the main elements being constantly negated is rigidity. Which is further enforced by the mostly pale, subdued, often muddy, deceptively gentle palette. I say deceptively because the work doesn't read as gentle to me, but it does read as unified by a considered sensitivity.
More thoughts to come, but that's a start.