Quotidian Aspect - Le Grand Café
Quotidian Aspect - Le Grand Café
Quotidian Aspect - Le Grand Café
Quotidian Aspect - Le Grand Café
Quotidian Aspect - Le Grand Café
Quotidian Aspect - Le Grand Café
Quotidian Aspect - Le Grand Café
Quotidian Aspect - Le Grand Café
Quotidian Aspect - Le Grand Café
Quotidian Aspect - Le Grand Café
Quotidian Aspect - Le Grand Café
Quotidian Aspect - Le Grand Café
Quotidian Aspect - Le Grand Café
Quotidian Aspect - Le Grand Café
Quotidian Aspect - Le Grand Café
Quotidian Aspect - Le Grand Café
Quotidian Aspect - Le Grand Café
Quotidian Aspect - Le Grand Café
Quotidian Aspect - Le Grand Café
Quotidian Aspect - Le Grand Café

Exhibition

If Toby Paterson’s work draws on modernist architectural sources, it does it with a view to renewing our reading of this heritage and opening it up to the question of landscape. “A lot of people think that my work is about architecture. This isn’t totally true. Architecture is just a pretext for looking. My work is about observing and feeling a given environment.”

His wall paintings, drawings, collages and sculpted modules propose a singular mixture of poetic abstraction and physical experience – a voyage through transitional spaces. In addition to his visual art training, skateboarding has given the artist a hypersensitivity to the texture and structure of urban materials along with a fragmentary approach to the townscape. From the real, he samples buildings that are then examined documented, stripped back to their essence and taken apart.

His working process generally involves a research trip during which he takes hundreds of photos of post-war buildings, often referring to an aesthetic of the ordinary and the everyday. This visual material is then sorted and incorporated unmodified in certain pictorial compositions (the collage series Bricolages, or mental maps of lived experiences) or idealised in a painted version that amplifies the latent abstraction of the image. The choice of palette – between soft pastels and flat areas of pure colour – occupies an important place in this recomposition of a parallel landscape.

here is another distinct family of works: the “hypothetical reliefs”, produced after the voyage. He defines these completely abstract volumes as “subjective hypotheses formulated in response to a town ; condensations of forms and colours”.

These different expressions of experience bear witness to his particular attention to shifts in scale and to the dynamics of circulation, both physical ; felt by the visitor in the exhibition space ; and mental: between document and memory, reality and imagination, figuration and abstraction.

This to and fro movement is all the more palpable in that it is wilfully orchestrated by the artist. Toby Paterson has a liking for sophisticated exhibition structures that produce maze-like pathways and trompe l’oeil games. Inserted into the space using lightweight frames or perfectly-finished shelves that recall the modernist grid, his carefully crafted motifs appear to float, like an atmosphere.These suspended architectural sections invent a complex space-time, both referential and emptied of all material ties: the permanent reconfiguration of remembered landscape.

Éva Prouteau

The project is supported by Fluxus (Franco-British Fund for Contemporary Art)

Artworks

Ground Floor / Large Room

Toby Paterson
Quotidian Painting (White Grid)
2007
Acrylic on Perspex
206 x 106 x 3,5 cm
Courtesy The Modern Institute, Glasgow
Toby Paterson
Pedestal
2005
Acrylic on wood
75 x 40 x 30 cm
Courtesy The Modern Institute, Glasgow
Toby Paterson
Cluster Relief (CDA)
2011
Acrylic on aluminium, 4 panels
130 x 110 cm each
Courtesy The Modern Institute, Glasgow
Toby Paterson
Built Colour Bricolage 1
2009
Collage on Perspex
80 x 80 x 3 cm
Courtesy Lange & Pult Gallery, Zürich
Toby Paterson
Built Colour Bricolage 2
2009
Collage on Perspex
80 x 80 x 2 cm
Courtesy Lange & Pult Gallery, Zürich
Toby Paterson
Built Colour Bricolage 5
2009
Collage on Perspex
90 x 70 x 3 cm
Courtesy Lange & Pult Gallery, Zürich
Toby Paterson
A Miniature (Red and White Pavilion)
2009
9 photographs and acrylic on perspex
86 x 61,5 x 2 cm
Courtesy The Modern Institute, Glasgow
Stairs

Toby Paterson
Generosity (Reconstruction)
2007
Photograph on aluminium
42,3 x 30 x 2,5 cm
Courtesy The Modern Institute, Glasgow
Étage

Toby Paterson
Landscape Painting (Gesture Economics)
2007
Acrylic on paper
156 x 122 cm
Courtesy The Modern Institute, Glasgow
Toby Paterson
Hypothetical Relief (Moscow)
2010
Acrylic relief and Perspex
30 x 30 x 7,5 cm
Courtesy The Modern Institute, Glasgow
Toby Paterson
Church In a New Town
2003
Acrylic on Perspex
120 x 80 x 3 cm
Courtesy The Modern Institute, Glasgow
Toby Paterson
Bridgemaster's Station
2007
Acrylic on Perspex
146 x 116 x 3,5 cm
Courtesy The Modern Institute, Glasgow
Toby Paterson
Brick Primary School
2002
Acrylic on Perspex,
50 x 40 x 2,5 cm
Courtesy The Modern Institute, Glasgow
Toby Paterson
Goldfinger Kiosk
2004
Acrylic painting on paper
48,7 x 36,2 x 2 cm
Courtesy The Modern Institute, Glasgow
Toby Paterson
Public Space
2007
Acrylic painting on paper
96,5 x 78,5 x 2,5 cm
Courtesy The Modern Institute, Glasgow
Toby Paterson
The Theatre of Illusion
2005
Acrylic painting on paper
Courtesy The Modern Institute, Glasgow
Toby Paterson
51 Bar
2004
Acrylic on perspex
60 x 40 x 3 cm
Courtesy The Modern Institute, Glasgow
Toby Paterson
Fountain
2007
Acrylic on perspex
177,2 x 128,2 x 3,3 cm
Courtesy The Modern Institute, Glasgow
Toby Paterson
Luna Park Pavillion
2004
Acrylique sur Perspex
70 x 40 x 3 cm
Courtesy The Modern Institute, Glasgow
Toby Paterson
C.D.A.
2011
Acrylic on aluminium
59,5 x 84 x 3 cm
Courtesy The Modern Institute, Glasgow
Toby Paterson
Hypothetical Relief (Sofia)
2009
Acrylic painting on Perspex
30 x 30 cm
Courtesy The Modern Institute, Glasgow
Toby Paterson
Naples Yellow Bricolage (Bulgaria, Estonia, Poland, Russia, Serbia)
2009
Collage sur cardboard
39 x 36 cm
Courtesy The Modern Institute, Glasgow
Toby Paterson
Memorial
2005
Acrylic painting on paper
96,5 x 126,5 x 3,5 cm
Courtesy The Modern Institute, Glasgow
Toby Paterson
Pink Bricolage (Bulgaria, Poland, Russia Serbia
2009
Collage on cardboard
39 x 36 cm
Courtesy The Modern Institute, Glasgow
Toby Paterson
Station Stairs
Acrylic on Perspex
120 x 195 x 5 cm
Courtesy The Modern Institute, Glasgow
Toby Paterson
Relief with Black, White and Grey Forms
2005
Perspex, acrylic painting, wood
100 x 100 x 4 cm
Courtesy The Modern Institute, Glasgow
Toby Paterson
Organic Relief 38
2004
Wood and acrylic painting
31 x 48 x 5 cm
Courtesy The Modern Institute, Glasgow

Biography

Born in 1974 in Glasgow, (Scotland) where he lives and works.
The artist is represented by the Modern Institute (Glasgow).

gallery website