Agathe Toman - MONTAGNE ROSE - 1/15

High-end impression photographic on glossy fine art paper. This work is not sold framed in order to facilitate shipping. Grainy photograph. Agathe Toman treats her photographs like paintings, making it hard to tell whether it is a painted work or a photographed one. Printed in Hossegor, France.
Pool photograph, captured with the iPhone 15 Pro Max in the Pyrenees, winter 2023.

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

Listed at Sotheby’s since 2021, her works have been auctioned three times, testimony to her rapid rise and acceptance within prestigious art circles. Her notable contributions to various fairs, notably Art Paris, have earned her immense success, consolidating her presence in numerous 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 powerful 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 kaleidoscopes of poetry, 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 pursued 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 focuses 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 reputable 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 and transforms it into art.

"MY VISION:

My work concerns the notion of the connections between the psyche and the corporeal.
Their modes of functioning together within their environments, the connections they build as well as the development of tangible and intangible 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 carry emotional depth and a certain tension, inviting the viewer to an introspective reflection.

I inscribe this intention in the very materiality of my works: resolutely abstract, in monochrome, nuanced, where darkness coexists with light, blue crackles at the touch of black, or shines on its own. We are in the absence/presence of light.
My paintings, my drawings, and my photographs are each an absolute creation, freed from any imitation.

A meticulous affinity between my hands and the pigments, the charcoals, the Bic ballpoint pen and the paints applied on paper or on canvas. My execution techniques never repeat themselves, and the result is always foreign. I thus work to fix the movement of matter, the density of light, to infuse it with myself, for the development of your memory.
There is always something one did not suspect. Something unexpected. This unspeakable.
The emergence of a decidedly unique imprint, my works are self-portraits, portraits of parts of me.

I would say that my creations are “materializations of psychic states,” human landscapes, threads of my soul, inviting others to merge with them.
Their value lies not in aesthetics but in the vibrations my works evoke in the viewer. It is two sensitivities meeting, no longer two separate individuals. It is a living process. I regard them as active beings, creating new links between Us. The viewer becomes a creator of the work as it comes to life.
I commit to a path toward a new vision of Being, toward the world, toward oneself, and toward others.

If the viewer now allows themselves to be invited, psychic resonances align and harmonize into a single symphony, a dialogue begins to establish. An anamorphosis of their soul takes shape, an elusive reflection. It is a poetic experience.
An intense and powerful presence. An exacting experience.

I want my works to refine human minds, sharpen souls, and for emotions to find an echo there, for words to resonate.
What matters is what the work mobilizes within 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 psychic inscription. The human being suffers not only because of events, or because of certain thoughts but because some processes within him have not found a mirror, an echo, a listening, a receptacle and remain adrift." René Roussillon - Manual of psychology and psychopathology of general clinical, page 146.