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).

Since the beginning of mankind, Homo sapiens have endeavoured to understand their relationship to the world as a structure of meanings. Where do we come from? How do we relate to the other living beings that inhabit the planet with us? How are we part of an infinite universe? Spiritual beliefs and myths, but also scientific observations and the resulting world views change over time and are an expression of how we humans interpret our relationship to the world.

We are increasingly exploring and penetrating the world. We decipher connections, we organise, quantify and name. We have created ever more complex instruments to do this. We find methods, formulate verifiable theorems and establish causalities between cause and effect. Researchers describe the world as it is, both physically and biologically. They use science to formulate terms and concepts and constantly achieve verifiable results. They decode the world and follow methodical procedures that open up immense possibilities for action. In this way, we make the world available to us. But science does not set itself the task of asking about the meaningfulness of life.

And what does art do? Art leads everything back to us. It asks about the meaning of knowledge for us. Artists are concerned with perception, or rather, with the nature of experience itself. How we perceive, visually, linguistically and aesthetically, but also how the experience of life takes place as an existential experience of “being in the world”. And art can transform our relationship with the world through narratives, through images and sounds, through poetry, into an experience of resonance.

Both science and art have their origins in intuition, imagination and conjecture. While scientists have to create evidence, artists can proceed more freely and make associations and imagination the material of their narratives. The meaning of existence and the experience of transcendence can hardly be found in science. We humans have to find them within ourselves. And we often create symbols to do so.

The Presence of Absence highlights matter as a presence into which life imprints itself. Energy and life are potent yet transient. The interplay between life, energy and matter is a central theme of the exhibition.

The exhibition will spatially juxtapose exhibits that translate the abstract concept of the “presence of absence” into an expanded realm of thought from both artistic and scientific perspectives. Works by significant contemporary artists will engage in dialogue with scientific exhibits from geology and astrophysics, including casts from Pompeii, footprints of prehistoric humans from the Laetoli site in present-day Tanzania and replicas of prehistoric cave paintings.

The curatorial narrative explores the astrophysical phenomenon of black holes. Concepts of expansion, time and the infinite cosmos challenge our understanding. Simultaneously, they provoke questions about our identity and origins. Our planet hovers somewhere between the boundless and the eternal. For a fleeting moment, the window of our lives opens, revealing the unique experience of our existence through our bodies, senses and minds. Each exhibit, in its own distinct way, engages with this existential exploration of being and humanity across the dimensions of space and time.

With this exhibition, we also trace the origins of art as a fundamental human desire to express abstract ideas. Why did Homo sapiens, tens of thousands of years ago, carve animal figures and abstract geometric shapes into the walls of deep caves? Why did they create images of things that were understood by others as symbols, serving as a connection to higher, non-manifest, spiritual realms? Why did Homo sapiens, unlike other species, develop a need for transcendence?

One of the countless stories and myths that moved us is recorded by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, written around 77 years AD, shortly before he met his death in the fiery ash rain of Pompeii: the myth of Butades of Sicyon, the Corinthian potter, and his daughter. The story goes like this: the young girl loved a young man who had to leave for a long journey. As the separation approached, the girl drew the outline of her lover’s head against the wall where the light of the fire fell. The father, moved by her plight, filled in this shadow image with colour and made a clay imprint of the outline, which he then fired. According to Pliny’s myth, art arises from the desire to capture the transient and fleeting; to preserve it out of wistfulness and longing, absence and memory, but also out of love and through beauty. This parable is touching because it embodies such fundamental feelings.

The outline, the stone wall and the fire—doesn’t this remind you of the earliest cave paintings and engravings found by palaeoanthropologists and archaeologists on every continent? Were these the origin of art at the dawn of humanity?

The oldest evidence is attributed to the Blombos Cave in South Africa, dating back 140,000 years. With the migrations of Homo sapiens, cave art spread across every continent. Despite such incredibly extended time periods, this early art exhibits similar techniques and motifs. These seem to have been passed down from group to group, from generation to generation, long before the physiological evolution of the larynx and brain suggested the emergence of language and writing.

For tens of thousands of years, humans—early artists—created images of animals, human figures and abstract signs. Did they grapple with the same questions and ideas that modern humans do?

The cave paintings of the San people in South Africa and Botswana, or those from the Magdalenian culture of the Stone Age in Europe, served as a readable visual language for early humans. They depicted the experienced environment while also representing the spiritual cosmos of these ancient people. The stone walls, where humans created their paintings, far from the outside world and deep in the darkness of the earth, were more than just canvases. They were like a skin that separated this world from the other. Negative forms and imprints of human hands have been found in caves on every continent. These suggest the magic of contact, the touch of a hand on the surface of the rock as a gateway to another world. Leaving a handprint may have been part of a sacred act of connection with an invisible beyond—a transcendental experience. It is evidence of the primordial human need and eternal quest for a deeper relationship with a reality beyond the individual.

Awe in the face of nature. The feeling that there is more than we know. The striving to understand, to perceive through both our senses and our minds the eternal structures that reveal the order of everything in this universe and ourselves as part of it.

Since the dawn of humanity, people have gazed at the night sky. “Mathematics is the language in which the book of the universe is written”, said Galileo Galilei. It is a way of assigning meaning to symbols that can then be read and understood by others. Mathematics is a universal language of human thought, and mathematical rules reflect the order found in all natural processes, whether it’s the Fibonacci sequence or Einstein’s equations. This makes mathematics the purest form of expressing universal principles. Music follows precise mathematical structures, the growth of plants, the sequence of tides and every form of existence can be described by mathematical equations. Yet, there remains so much that humanity does not yet understand. Time and again, the power of the human mind will strive to push these boundaries.

What is the origin of all matter on earth and in the infinity of the cosmos? What effects do natural events create that reshape the earth and affect people’s lives with their power? And how do people deal with the existential need to face eternity in their finiteness? What myths and images do they create in order to connect with the spiritual? Is art a way of immortalising oneself in time? The exhibition is dedicated to these questions, which have been driving the human imagination from prehistoric times to the present day. Ever since we humans have existed on earth, we have created stories, symbols and signs to give form to our feelings, thoughts and knowledge, to leave traces in time and perhaps to connect with eternity.

We experience the miracle of reality through the senses of our body. This consists of the elements of exploding stars in space: the nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood and the carbon in our cells. In fleeting moments, we connect with eternity and give traces of existence a material form. Art is one way of doing this.

I would like to thank Claudio Parmiggiani, Indigo and Mayo Bucher, the sons of Heidi Bucher, Toni R. Toivonen, Petra Noordkamp, the artists of the Marshmallow Laser Feast collective and Lawrence Malstaf, as well as the institutional lenders, Dr Gabriel Zuchtriegel and the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, Prof Dr Fabio Martini and Dr Lapo Baglioni of the Florentine Museum and Institute of Prehistory “Paolo Graziosi”, the Natural History Museum Vienna, the LWL-Museum of Natural History in Münster, Nicolò Stabile, founder of the initiative Il Cretto è casa mia of the survivors of the earthquake in the town of Gibellina, as well as the photographer Giuseppe Ippolito, the VR creator Alberto Stabile and the writer Giovanna Giordano. I would like to thank the Italian Consulate General for its patronage. I would especially like to thank Prof Dr Andreas Mulch, Director of the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt, and Prof Dr Luciano Rezzolla from the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the Goethe University Frankfurt for a time of joint thinking and working.

Franziska Nori
Director Frankfurter Kunstverein