Agathe Toman - ÉTÉ #024 - A3 - 1/15

High-end impression photographique on glossy fine art paper. This work is not sold framed to facilitate transport. Grainy photography. Agathe Toman treats her photographs like paintings, so it is difficult to tell whether it is a painted work or a photographed one. Printed in Hossegor, France.
Photograph of a pool, captured with an iPhone 15 Pro Max in Hossegor, summer 2021.

Agathe Toman, an artist listed at Sotheby’s since 2021.
Artist’s biography:
Born in 1989, of French, Austrian, and Czech origins, Agathe Toman is a French multidisciplinary artist whose talent spans painting to poetry, including drawing and photography. Based between Hossegor and Paris, Agathe establishes herself as an emerging figure on the contemporary art scene, appreciated both nationally and internationally.

Listed at Sotheby’s since 2021, her works have been auctioned three times, signaling her rapid rise and acceptance within prestigious art circles. Her notable contributions to various fairs, notably Art Paris, earned her immense success, anchoring her presence in private collections around the world.

Agathe’s palette favors deep shades of black and blue, colors that are the essence of her creation. Her paintings use pure pigments and intensely striking acrylics, while her drawings, made with a Bic ballpoint pen, captivate with their hypnotic character. Agathe’s photographs, with extraordinary depth, as well as her poems’ kaleidoscopes, enrich her universe with an abstract language that defines her work.

Beyond her artistic practice, Agathe is also deeply engaged in the study of psychoanalysis, which she has been pursuing for three years. This exploration enriches her conceptual process, allowing her to integrate profound psychological dimensions into her art.

Agathe does not separate her art from her social commitments. With unwavering determination, she concentrates her work on crucial themes such as mental health and the environment. These lines of thought are not only present in her art; they are an integral part of her artistic identity.

Her work has been recognized and celebrated in several renowned publications, including Forbes, L’Oeil, and Elle, marking her notable impact in the field of contemporary art.

Agathe Toman continues to fascinate and inspire a global audience, offering through her works a window into the complexity of the human experience as she perceives it and transforms it into art.

"MY VISION:

My work focuses on the notion of links between the psyche and the corporeal. Their ways of functioning together within their environments, the connections they build, and the making of perceptible and imperceptible vibrations that arise from them.
I explore themes such as identity, memory, human nature, and the relationship between the individual and their environment. My works are imbued with emotional depth and a certain tension, inviting the viewer to an introspective reflection.

I place this intention within the very materiality of my works: resolutely abstract, in monochromes, nuanced, where darkness cohabits with clarity, blue crackles upon contact with black, or lights up on its own. We are in the absence/presence of light.
My paintings, drawings, and photographs are each an absolute creation, free from imitation.

A meticulous intimacy between my hands and pigments, drawing tools, Bic pen, and paints applied to paper or canvas. My execution techniques never repeat, and the result is always unfamiliar. I thus work to fix the movement of matter, the density of light, to infuse myself into it for the creation of your memory.
There is always something one did not suspect. Something unexpected. This ineffable thing.
The emergence of a decidedly unique imprint, my works are self-portraits, portraits of parts of myself.

I say that my creations are a “materialization of psychic states,” human landscapes, threads of my soul, inviting others to melt into them.
Their value is not aesthetic; it lies in the vibrations my works create in the viewer. It is two sensitivities meeting rather than two separate individuals. It is a living process. I regard them as active beings, forging new bonds between us. The viewer also becomes a creator of the work; it comes to life through them.
I commit to a path toward a new vision of Being, of the world, of oneself, and of others.

If the viewer now allows themselves to be invited, psychical resonances align in a single symphony, a dialogue begins to take shape. An anamorphosis of one’s soul emerges, an elusive reflection. It is a poetic experience.
An intense and powerful presence. A demanding experience.

I want my works to refine the human minds, sharpen the souls, and for emotions to find an echo, for words to resonate.
What matters is what the work mobilizes in us, and the result of that encounter."

"Psychic suffering is linked to everything that escapes the process of subjectivizing symbolization. We suffer from what is psychically blocked, or awaiting psychical inscription. The human being suffers not only because of events or certain thoughts but because some processes inside him have not found a mirror, an echo, a listening, a receptacle and thus remain adrift." René Roussillon - Manual of Psychology and Pathology of General Clinical Practice, page 146.