Roger Toledo

Thomas Nickles Project is pleased to present the first solo show with the gallery of Roger Toledo, known for his comprehensive exploration of the manifold properties and applications of color through a wide array of abstract practices. Par | Ergon brings together two series which bookend the artist’s oeuvre, highlighting how his lifelong fascination with mathematics and color manifests as the structural underpinning for the analytical investigation of his heritage.

Throughout the gallery large canvases from one of Toledo’s earliest bodies of work, Days at the Museum, translate paintings of the Cuban avant-garde in the collection of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes into the abstract synthesis of their palettes, each expressed in an imbricated patchwork of 25 chromatic fields. These works intermingle with Parergon, his latest series, where the focus shifts from painting to the frame as an independent work, in seven dynamic object-frames the artist sculpts with skills passed on by his father using reclaimed lumber from Cuban colonial period houses; their form saturated with meaning and an ecstatic expression of their materiality.

Toledo embraces and pushes the already many-sided definition of parergon in the historical discourse of art which begins with the concept that it is does not reference/identify an independent entity, but something secondary or auxiliary, par, to the central subject, the ergon. Traditionally, this interconnectedness arises between elements within the pictorial plane or between the work and the frame. Days at the Museum eliminates the ergon of the avant-garde work in its abstracted chromatic composition, rendering itself parergon to the original painting. Parergon imbues the frame with the technique, aesthetics and concept previously reserved for the work it surrounds, making it a work in and of itself.

The exhibition engages viewers in a cultural interchange that extends beyond the different paths in Toledo’s work. Days at the Museum could be considered a color-based chronicle of Cuban painting; Parergon, the frame of a history yet to be written. Both, embody the artist’s distinctive union of the pictorial with physical matter and cultural trails. Behind the visual dialogue that Toledo’s exhibit contains, there is a look at the Cuban patrimonial footprint, an attempt to rescue and renew the artist’s material culture, and therefore his own place in history.