Fortuitous Moments

Driftwood and ocean waves and clouds gathering against the sky. Fiery sunsets you pull over to the side of the road to watch. Tobias Tovera’s paintings evoke these natural phenomena without overtly representing these subjects. And like the sounds of water or the sight of a sunset, his paintings are meditative and tranquil and soothing. But that’s not the end of the story.

Tovera’s work avoids the traps associated with idealized depictions of “nature.” Nothing is grandiose or romanticized, unrealistic and therefore off-putting. By merely mimicking the forms, patterns, and colors found in nature, his work operates on the level of reminiscence. Crimson layers like petals bloom from a glowing yellow center in Inner Space, conjuring thoughts of both exterior and interior landscapes. In Outer Space, aquamarine and blue spread outward in concentric ripples. It triggers something—a sky at dusk, the inky depression of a tide pool, the cross-section of a tree. The artist doesn’t force the viewer into these interpretations; our minds are left to wander and search through previous sensations for a match. We take the work on our own terms.

This open-ended quality also characterizes Tovera’s process, a tender balance between his will and his materials’. The artist chooses colors and controls the portions he pours onto the wood surface. After that, the wood decides how the pigment will evaporate, where it will permeate and dry into layers, where it will build up into patterns of rich color. Unlike the abandonment and exuberant splashes of Jackson Pollock, who dripped and dropped paint onto a canvas, Tovera remains self-aware throughout his application. If he bears resemblance to any Abstract Expressionist, it would be Mark Rothko, whose color field paintings were infused with a sacred hum. Tovera brings a reverential awareness to his artistic process, embracing the moment when the paint leaves his hand, ever-conscious of and fascinated by the disjuncture between his intentions and their manifestation.

This attachment to process aligns Tovera with a diverse group of painters currently working in and around Los Angeles, dubbed the “Flow Painters” by Peter Frank in a March 2008 issue of art ltd. The informal group’s work is united by a shared interest in and embrace of the paint’s physical qualities. Writer Frank connects this process to Eastern systems of energy, writing that “the equilibrium that flow painting maintains between the hand of the artist and the nature of the media employed—and especially the balance that must be established between what is intended and what is achieved—finds its most vivid model in the Eastern comprehension of the flow of energy.” This description certainly rings true for Tovera, who, in addition to being an artist, is a student of meditation and Eastern energy work, and his work is permanently installed in therapeutic and leisure environments, such as spas and hotels.

But his work also shows in art galleries, and it is in this latter environment that Tovera’s abstractions are particularly intriguing. His work’s organic quality—the sense that his paintings are natural organisms rather than depictions of such organisms—highlights the similarity between our expectations of “nature” and our expectations of “art.” We look to both for an aesthetic charge, a sight or sensation that will provide us with a sense of connection. By beholding something whose beauty is universally irrefutable, we feel a part of the whole. Increasingly alienated from our capitalist society, we seek out the aesthetic as a soothing balm.

That’s a complicated way of saying this: We expect art to give us a sense of connection to the world and ourselves. We expect nature to give us the same thing. Tovera’s work, in its embrace of entropy and fluidity, its references to and imitation of the natural world, plays on this parallel set of expectations. Are his paintings nature or art? Maybe they are both.

-Victoria Gannon

Review for the Micaela Gallery exhibition catalog / 04-09

The Medicine of Space

Tobias Tovera’s exhibition at the Melting Point Gallery features four powerful works that also function together as an installation exploring themes of life and death, religion, medicine, healing and consciousness. Creating an environment that at first glance might be mistaken for Dr Frankenstein’s laboratory transplanted to the bowels of a Masonic lodge through using a range of materials from hospital equipment, to sound recordings, copper, moths, and even a pew, Tovera links the physical and man-made world to the spiritual one. The resulting aesthetic although immersed in the traditional, occasionally mystical, past, is clearly aligned with the technological present.

Tovera’s exploration of medicine’s unquestioned power in today’s society is most evident in The Progress of Life & Destruction (2002). Secreted behind a hospital screen a gurney supports a sheet of copper onto which saline solution drips continuously, the oxidization promoted by the salt creating a verdigris patina over time. A metaphor for the absent body and a healing medium in itself, the copper glows in the light of the operating lamp evincing a seductively soothing quality. Its dual nature recalls both the floor sculptures of Carl Andre and works by Chen Zhen who, sharing Tovera’s skepticism about the faith placed in intrusive Western medicinal procedures, posited a return to traditional Eastern remedies, based on the belief that the entire body, rather than just the locally affected area needs to be treated.

A cautionary element is again manifest in the more recent Custodian of the Law (2005), which also exemplifies the invitational, interactive element that Tovera uses to great effect in fostering an exchange between artistic space and the observer. A highly polished kneeling pew, a sculpturally beautiful object in its own right, faces a light box depicting the all-seeing eye, here digitally manipulated by the artist to sit atop the unfinished pyramid. More familiar to most as the reverse of Great Seal of the United States printed on the dollar bill, the individual elements of this symbol have long held a place of great importance within the Rosicrucian and freemasonry traditions. Referencing both materialism and religion, Tovera juxtaposes the secular and the religious to explore the intricate, and often paradoxical, relationship between the material and the spiritual. Whilst the Masonic devices represent constructed theologies and secrecy, they exude an inaccessibility we face also when trying to comprehend the tenets of medicine, for example. In this particular case, however, the patient would seem to be society and the illness a crisis of faith.

References to religion, or spirituality, continue throughout the exhibition whether in the video triptych, Relocating the Center of Gravity (2004­–05), an exploration of the divided self, or in one of the audio components of Knowledge Spins Where Larva Once Formed― a professional hypnotist’s voice subjected to a triple-reverb shift, that takes on the echoing intonation of a minister’s pulpit sermons. Indeed, the audio rhythms act as a counterpoint to the somber gravity, not without beauty, of the works, and also emphasize the life and death cycle. In Knowledge, particularly, we are inescapably faced with our mortality in the form of a lunar moth transfixed inside a light-box for eternity, its compressed lifecycle, a mere 24 hours, comparable to the passing of our life cycles within the greater picture.

While his ultimate belief in healing through connecting to the spiritual aspect of people and the world marks Tovera as a shaman, the artist steers clear of any attempts to proselytize or convert. Rather he seeks to draw attention to the disjunct that exists between the spiritual and the material, the individual and society, interior and exterior, the subconscious and the physical, and the alienation we may feel from those things most intended to give us succor and relief―religion and medicine, for example―suggesting we trust instead to ourselves for answers.

-Leigh Markopoulos

Review for the Melting Point Gallery exhibition catalog / 11-05 / p.1-2

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