You might notice that English painter Agnes Toth’s work looks incomplete. Although logic entices us to notice the missing links, Toth’s techinque aspires to find the threshold between abstract and figurative painting. Her colorful, intentionally half-finished, realistic paintings are the result.
Toth began to create these incomplete paintings in 2008. This method gave her a sense of freedom — the possibility to not feel obligated to fill in the canvas from one corner to the other. The incompleteness of her work also derives from her life philosophy, one that aims towards working and living at a slower pace. “This is what I aim to achieve with my paintings,” she says, “to get back to that harmony and contemplation, to celebrate beauty and serenity.” For Toth, one of the purposes of painting is a meditation exercise, one that requires full concentration on her creative intentions.
In a sense, her pieces provide the viewer with the possibility to become more contemplative. In trying to take everything in, we get lost in the various colorful, fragmented pieces in the hope of somehow putting it all back together.
