Anya Roberts-Toney’s Radiant Ignitions by Paul Maziar

“Space is not something accorded from the outside; it is a condition of existence born from within. It is what has been, or will be, grown into. Space in nature is what the seed contains.” — John Berger

Space is made where we make time, when we register our lives and each other. The same goes for the practice of making art. The spaces inside us, a kind of geography, have no inherent borders or divisions but must be drawn and negotiated with attention. The paintings in Anya Roberts-Toney’s exhibition at Nationale, Summer's Eve, show this attention, this imagination—and the wherewithal to make up new kinds of lands. In this work, Roberts-Toney shows the evolution of a painter who has spent ample time observing and creating by way of looking, so that now the act of painting is an expression of the movements and rhythms, the spaces of her mind. Looking at her new work, there’s no reason to think that such a practice would produce anything but pleasure, agency. I am happy to be plunged into Roberts-Toney’s world of simultaneity and strangeness, where traces of art-history and today commingle on imaginary planes and vistas with ineffable figures and forms.

The paintings in Summer’s Eve are the result of a process that involves equal proportions rigor and abandon, foregrounded by a hard-won inner peace (another kind of space) and a persistent hope for change. This specific change is related to violence against women, “and the refusal of so many to believe women,” as she related to me when I asked about this new body of work. Roberts-Toney’s social concerns and emotional frame of reference allow the provisional to give way to the possibility of new forms. You see this in her brushwork, where the horizon indicates a sudden, distant bather, or a field bears a bust. In the possibility of the feminine, strength lies in will to allow change, the openness to vulnerability. In possibility there is transcendence; in transcendence there is power.

Roberts-Toney astutely remarked to me that “images of feminine angst and adoration can evoke power.” The surfaces of Summer’s Eve are redolent of this. The women in her paintings are seen in all manner of reverie: queens in daydreams and bacchanal dances, seeing into this reality (through the looking-glass of flowers), or else facing a darkened mirror. Her chosen palette: raw umbers and siennas, flame-hues of cadmium reds and carmines, hot pink, chartreuse, lavender; and elsewhere, coal tones round out an oeuvre that already feels whole. Having spent time working with the still life motif, Roberts-Toney has newly introduced the sky and horizon to her compositions, adding to their expansiveness and visionary feel as well as their being grounded in the perceivable.

I am struck by the cosmic, ambiguous (I mean multivalent) imagery and dreamland aspect of Roberts-Toney’s paintings; these characteristics in visual art are revelations to the inner spaces of a viewer. In fantastical works like New Monuments, with its janus-faced mermaid, geyser-eyed fountains and candy-colored skies, whatever world being proposed is preferred to the one that we live in. According to our painter, surprise is the fitting effect. “I want the viewer to want to get close to my paintings, so I'm always looking for methods of bringing them up close. And when they get there it might become something different—the image might not be clear or there might be drips or blurring where you thought it should be clean, or the mermaid might have two heads. But color draws you in.” 

Roberts-Toney’s subject is often found through desire, with an element of a disruptive urge one may be tempted to eschew. This urge manifests or invites dissolution into her composition. She’ll use a flat brush to employ a blurring technique that lends the picture an illusory air. One stroke leads playfully to another, where suddenly, the picture just happens. But again, her practice is a balanced, considered one, involving spontaneity and care. Perhaps this is how to ablate the anger, the certain disorientation and malaise of living in a pandemic compounded by social crisis: you paint a face that metamorphoses into a harlequinade Medusa whose eyes have turned to suns. Or are they flowers? 

The brushwork throughout Summer’s Eve shows elements of desire and of devotion, adding more meaning to the painterly disintegration that Roberts-Toney embraces. Her figures, upon their strange and beautiful lands, her visages that morph with still life bouquets or reject their drowned mythos, preside over history with serenity and strength. This, to me, shows the use of art in human society.  By such methods, renunciation of the world can bring us right back to the world, having traveled to far-off new spaces by way of radiant ignitions in paint.

This commissioned essay is supported by funds from the Oregon Arts Commission. 

Summer’s Eve is on view through September 13, 2020.
All images © Mario Gallucci