Visual Thinking
Toshain’s objects, paintings videos and instalations exist as a physical form of media, whose primary function is purely visual communication - immediate perception, feeling, mood, meaning, as well as fleeting memory images. Visial stimulation based on the the idea that form is disseminateing knowledge more effectivly than almost any other viacle of communication. It is intuitive, universal and international, it knows no limits of thoung, vocabulary or grammar and it can be percieved by the literat as well as the non literat.
Nowadays NON verbal ways become incrisingly important as humans need to navigate true more and more information on dayly basis.
The comunicative and expressive dimension of form touches the inner core of humanity like no other medium. You always have an access point.
The forms are based on 3D visualisation and basic principles of mathematics: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. As more tiles are added to the sequence so the design grows and creates a pattern. Its structural units include line, shape, color, form, motion, texture, pattern, direction, orientation, scale, angle, space and proportion. The elements in the image represent concepts in a spatial context, rather than the linear form used for words and linear way of thinking.
Throughout history and especially in ancient cultures visual language has been used to encode meaning.
I.T
Constructions beyond the three-dimensional
The artist Iv Toshain is currently displaying her new works from a series that was
already highly acclaimed upon presentation in New York. What she describes as „functional visual communication“ refers to elementary structures that are
comprehensible to everyone: her elaborative Plexiglas artworks consist of
intertwining heavy black lines forming geometric patterns. They actually remind of
line graphs of four-dimensional cross polytope, or details thereof; while Iv Toshain
propagates her own matrix, e.g. as insinuated by the title „The theory of
Everything“. In her work „The Sky is the Limit“, Toshain connects the topic of higher
dimensionality with reality. She cites a white structure, a four-dimensional dice,
mingled with triangles (from a mixed up Penrose Pattern) and thereby subdivides the
sky-blue into numerous planes and shades. This transforms the structured sky into a
kind of projection screen suspended from a thick rope against a white background.
Ergo, a realistically painted landscape appears as an excerpt behind a black
Plexiglas oval. Iv Toshain’s art effectively reflects constructions that are set behind a
3D-perceived world.
By Renate Quehenberger / artmagazine.cc 16.02.2011
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“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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