Tony Toscani

Tony Toscani was born in Abington, Pennsylvania in 1986. He received his Bachelor of Arts from Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, and a Masters of Fine Art from the School of Visual Arts in 2011. During his early development as a painter, he worked in various styles and mediums. Currently, his works are primarily focused on figuration.​

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Stylistically, Toscani’s figures recall those of Pablo Picasso, Fernard Léger, or Fernando Botero, but he imbues them with a sense of social anxiety and existential dread. His elongated figures with tiny heads appear absentminded or dreamy as they contemplate a cup of coffee or hunch over an open laptop. Alone even in a crowd, his figures embody the apathy and alienation of digital life, where screen time has come to overpower genuine human interaction. ​

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Toscani’s work takes an intimate look at scenes from everyday life while poetically fusing together logic and spirituality. His figures wander in and out of exaggerated proportions immersed in personal anxiety in what seems to be a familiar, but unfamiliar world. Toscani most often links his work to our deep sense of melancholy and apathy that permeates our private life, a theme that closely echoes that of the great masters.​

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“I’m mostly influenced by our perpetuating apathetic behaviour,” Toscani says. “It’s one of the leading causes for our melancholy and is what makes us uniquely human, much more so than a specialised contemporary theme that narrows in on a social climate during a specific time period.” It’s for this reason, that Tony’s work seems outlandishly familiar – he references a personal experience that is inevitably universal.