“There is even something absolutely inhuman about the face,” wrote philosophers Deleuze and Guattari in teaching us about faciality, or face perception, one of the few instincts attributed to humans (it is said that there are no true human instincts, or actions that we follow irresistibly). Such inhuman faces are to be found in Iv Toshain’s drawings. Toshain
uses transparencies on top of drawings, effectively having the demons and beasts emerge X-Ray-like from the smooth skin and groomed hair. I prefer not to see these images as commentaries on beauty or ugliness as manufactured by fashion magazines, for beauty and ugliness need as few words as possible to make their strongest statement,
but rather these are illustrations (in that they’re not realistic), like anatomical charts or Freud’s funny little drawings of the ego, of the primeval tar pits and genetic cesspools that distance humans only several degrees from hirsute wolves. It’s kind of scary.
Jason Foumberg, Chicago based art critic

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Metafigurative deals with the slip between interior and exterior worlds, as a body, a body which is defined in the between of the interior and exterior of itself. The eclipsed interiority/exteriority of the body, a darkness which determines the impossibility of separating the inside from the outside, the form from the content. As a body which is subject to experience through these states without the dichotomy of these culturally, religiously, canonised polarisations and tendencies to spatially demarcate, map and ultimately to fragment the body. Rather considering the body holistically along with all that affects and effects it into being, and from this trajectory, Metafigurative art as a being, a body might also become other things, machines, nature, matter – perhaps through hybridity, transformation, metamorphosis, mimesis, mimicry. With our inability to separate our experience of the world from the sensible body - whether Metafigurative art is the work of embodied gestures?
Catherine Maffioletti, London based artist

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