Adulto, maschio (Adult man), 2000
Resin
140 x 80 x 35 cm

Courtesy Italian Ministry of Culture/Archeological Park of Pompeii

The Archaeological Park of Pompeii has provided two of the most touching casts of human victims of the eruption of the Vesuvius from its collection for the exhibition The Presence of Absence.

In 79 AD, Vesuvius erupted in the Gulf of Naples. Ash, pumice and lapilli (small lava stones) rained down on houses, people and other living creatures in the city of Pompeii for days. The earth had already trembled 17 years earlier and shaken the region, an omen of the impending catastrophe. Noble families sold their sumptuous but damaged houses to newly rich merchant families and moved away. Nobody suspected the approaching deadly danger. But the force of the volcanic eruption spared no one, neither the rich nor the slaves. The unexpected catastrophe wiped out local life with a destructive force comparable to that of the volcano eruption in Laetoli, in present-day Tanzania, 3.5 million years ago or the earthquake on Sicily in 1968. A zero hour.

What had once been a vibrant trading city of ancient Roman times froze in time. A ten-metre thick layer of ash and volcanic rock covered the city like a burial shroud. Nature reclaimed the landscape. Over time, a grey desert transformed into fertile land and pastures. People knew of the events from the letters of Pliny the Younger, an eyewitness. Yet, for over a millennium, Pompeii faded into oblivion. It was only in the 18th century, during a period of renewed archaeological interest, that Pompeii was rediscovered.

During excavations in 1863, Giuseppe Fiorelli, the head of Pompeii’s city administration, discovered mysterious voids in the sediment. These voids contained human bones. The archaeologist’s intuition led him to try a technique known from sculpture and metal casting. He poured liquid plaster into the underground cavities. The plaster took on the form of human bodies. Fiorelli made 100 casts of a total of 650 hollow spaces—the traces of ancient victims of the catastrophe, whose bodies had almost completely vaporised in the heat. The forms were uncovered and can still be seen today in the collection of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii.

“It is impossible to look upon these three deformed figures and not be inwardly moved… They have been dead for eighteen centuries, but they are human beings whom you can see in the agony of their death. This is no art, no imitation, but their bones, the remains of their flesh and their clothes mixed with plaster: it is the pain of death that has regained body and form… Until now, temples, houses and other objects have been discovered that spark the curiosity of scholars, artists and archaeologists; but now you, my Fiorelli, have discovered human suffering, and everyone who is human can feel it”.

From: Luigi Settembrini, Lettera ai pompeiani (Letter to the Pompeians), 1863

“The purpose of reconstructing this world is to extend and perhaps even relativise our own world; another world is possible—change is possible. Things have changed, sometimes radically, and they will continue to do so in the future. […] What was and what will be is beyond anyone’s control, but the blend of remembering and forgetting with which we view our history is in our hands”.

From: Gabriel Zuchtriegel, Vom Zauber des Untergangs. Was Pompeji über uns erzählt (On the Magic of Destruction: What Pompeii Tells Us About Ourselves), 2023

The Rivers and Streams of a Dissolved Mind, 2024
Brass and original substance from a dead animal
100 x 126 cm
Courtesy Toni R. Toivonen and Galerie Forsblom

The Perfect Moment, 2022
Brass and original substance from a dead animal
400 x 200 cm
Courtesy Nelimarkka Foundation

Mother, 2022
Brass and original substance from a dead animal
300 x 200 cm
Courtesy Private Collection, Finland

Metascape (3), 2022
Brass and original substance from a dead animal
32 x 38,5
Courtesy Private Collection, Finland

Crucifixion, 2018
Brass and original substance from a dead animal
300 x 400 cm
Courtesy Sara Hildén Art Museum

21 Strangers (In My Head), 2024
Brass and original substance from a dead animal
48 x 61 cm
Courtesy Toni R. Toivonen and Galerie Forsblom

The Agony And The Ecstasy, 2024
Brass and original substance from a dead animal
500 x 200 cm
Co-produced by Frankfurter Kunstverein
Courtesy Toni R. Toivonen and Galerie Forsblom

Toni R. Toivonen: Miten kuolema kunnioittaa elämää? (Toni R. Toivonen: How Death Honors Life), 2023
Film, 17 min
Directed by Meeri Koutaniemi
Season 2, Episode 5 of the TV series Irti Kuvasta with Meeri Koutaniemi
Produced by Gimmeyawallet Productions, Executive Producer: Elise Pietarila
Courtesy Gimmeyawallet Productions

Toni R. Toivonen is a seeker. He creates images that pose the overarching question of what life is and what remains when it fades away. He creates images that reveal the unspeakable, for which there is neither image nor word, in order to capture the moment of transition between being and non-being and to outlast transience through the sacrality of the image.

For his central motif, Toni R. Toivonen has chosen the animal, either alone or in groups. Since the origins of mankind, animals have been magically charged beings, guardians and mediators of the connection to the spiritual world. Already in prehistoric times, people painted and carved animal figures on cave walls, turning them into sacred places. The artists were shamans.

Toivonen is a painter, but he does not paint the animals. Toivonen has a deep knowledge of the history of art and painting. He has mastered the language and meanings of colour, form, material and symbolism. But after years of painting, he has abandoned the artistic gesture of depiction by imitation. Allegory and symbols no longer meet his needs in his search for the existential. He allows reality to imprint its own image on the material.

The artist approaches the mystery of life with reverence. He creates the conditions to allow the cycle of life to take place. Everything is transformation. To see transience, not to avert one’s gaze but to find comfort in the natural cycle, is the fragile level on which Toivonen moves. Melancholy and sadness, despite beauty— sacred experience.

Toni R. Toivonen seeks forms of comprehension for this fundamental human experience: transience as the most immeasurable of all absences. His works bear the imprints of the living and allow them to become objects of silent contemplation in sublime beauty. The absent forms of the departed animals are deeply inscribed in the imprint.

Toivonen lives and works far from the city, in the solitude of the Finnish forests. His artworks arise from a deep connection with animals. They are companions and beings for whom he feels respect and love. None of the animals lose their lives for art. Some of them, horses and dogs, died a natural death after spending their lives with Toivonen. Others were brought by foresters or by people whose wish it was to eternalise their animals in memory. The sacredness of the moment of transition—from life to death—is a mystery for the artist, which he endeavours to approach with his paintings.

The artist places the bodies of the dead creatures on brass surfaces. He arranges them carefully. It is the bodies that change the metal. It is the substance that surfaces, of which all living things are made. It corrodes and oxidises the metal. Like an alchemist, Toivonen has studied and tested the mutual reactions of bodies and metal. His art is created during weeks of waiting and observing, in which the cycle of nature takes its course and the cycle of becoming and fading is immortalised in the metal. What emerges are monumental images, figurative or abstract. They are signs of an incarnation, yet they visualise more than mere allusions.

The colour gold plays an essential role in Toivonen’s works. From Ancient Egypt, the cults of the Incas, Byzantine mosaics and Christian painting from the Middle Ages to modern times, the beauty of gold symbolises the transcendent, the supernatural and the eternal. And so Toivonen’s paintings are not created on canvases, but on golden yellow brass plates. Brass has the property of oxidising on contact with bodies; it absorbs all imprints as shapes in its surface.

Image and death and the question of transcendence have belonged together since archaic societies (see Hans Belting, Bild-Anthropologie, 2001). In all cultures and at all times, people have searched for forms and rituals to make it possible to experience a connection between the here and now and the hereafter of a spiritual order through images. Toivonen’s works are imprints and symbolise the endurance of the ephemeral.

“You need shadows to understand the light. In a way, you have to recognise death in order to understand life”, says Toivonen.

Toni R. Toivonen (b. 1987, Helsinki, FI) lives and works in Hämeenkoski, Finland. He completed his Master of Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki (FI) in 2016, following his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Arts Academy of Turku University of Applied Sciences (FI) in 2012. Toivonen has exhibited his work in several solo exhibitions in Finland and internationally, including in Stockholm (SE) and Vienna (AT). His works have also been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including the Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki (FI), the Rovaniemi Art Museum, Rovaniemi (FI), and the Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin (DE). His works are part of major public collections, such as the KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (FI), the Sara Hildén Art Museum, Tampere (FI), the Museum of Contemporary Art Kraków MOCAK, Kraków (PL), the Nelimarkka Museum, Alajärvi (FI), the Saastamoinen Foundation, Helsinki (FI), and the Wihuri Foundation, Helsinki (FI). Toivonen has received multiple awards for his art, which has been documented in the films HEAVY (Theo Bat Schandorff, 2018) and Irti Kuvasta (Meeri Koutaniemi, YLE, 2023).