#Kjúb 11: Juraj Toman: Painting

The emergence of the image, painting right in front of the viewers’ eyes online streamed from Kyuba.

The young painter Juraj Toman (1985) focuses in his work mainly on painting landscapes and urban spaces. He reopens and reassesses the genre of landscape painting, especially in terms of its narrative qualities. The hallmark of Toman’s paintings is a multi-level understanding of space. He layers it in a similar way as human perception does – always working with more than one space-time. This principle manifests itself in Juraj Toman’s paintings as the simultaneous painting of two planes of the depicted landscape or urban space on one canvas. He does not shy away from a certain nostalgia – where the mixing of what was / will be / could be, acts as a representation of something missing, incomplete in the way the world appears “here and now”. Sometimes we find ourselves in the past, sometimes in the present, always having the possibility to switch between these layers, to “refocus” our gaze on another level of reality. The most inspiring for Toman are the empty streets of the city, including its “non-places” – abandoned, dysfunctional, logic-less exteriors. He does not specifically warn us about the transition to another reality, he most often lets the viewer’s gaze simply “fall” into it in the second half of the picture. He uses persuasive means of current artistic language, but not without a subtle admixture of “retro” expression. Juraj Toman is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava (studio of Klaudia Kosziba) and the Academy of Arts in Banská Bystrica, where he received his ArtD (Doctor of Arts) degree in 2014.