Jeff P.’s Serpentine Work Reimagines Naturalist Painting Tradition

Swiss painter Barbara Tosatto’s work takes cues from the storied and symbolic. Most of her pieces focus on a solitary figure, transplanted in some vacant background, isolated from indicators of time or setting. These figures are human, but disrupted — bound in sheets and gauzy veils, or weighed down with ropes or chains. With titles like “The Tyranny of Doubt” or “The Truce” it’s hard not to see the pieces as portraits of mythological characters, embodying some archetypal human ability or curse. Mostly depicted with their faces obscured, or contorted from some type of bondage, the figures’ entrapment seems more tragic in their desolate surroundings, offering no alternative to the struggle. But their situation is still somehow noble, if seen as shouldering the weight of humanity’s conditions.