'CHILD'S PLAY FOR PETER-TOLTZ' by BRIDGET CORMACK
Originally published in 'The AUSTRALIAN' February 6, 2012
STRADDLING the fuzzy realm between reality and fiction, the latest series of paintings by Marie Peter-Toltz reads like a childhood fairytale.
"In this current series of oil paintings, I fused drawings of real-life models, photographs of myself as a child, and the memory of childhood scenes," Peter-Toltz says. Where The Trail of Miracles Ran Cold, pictured, is the most important piece in her exhibition, Prologues. "They are four different girls but they could also be the different aspects of one person," she says. Over the past 18 months, the France-born painter and wife of Australian Booker-shortlisted author Steve Toltz has spent time painting in the US and France. This dreamy series is the product of that nomadic time. "I've always worked while I'm travelling. I carry the paints with me in a box on the plane."
24 hours The Arts Diary / ART section
Originally published in the 'Sydney Morning Herald' February 7, 2012
‘In this current series of oil paintings, I fused drawings of real-life models, photographs of myself as a child and the memory of childhood scenes’, Sydney artist Marie Peter-Toltz says of her solo exhibition Prologues, including Where The Trail of Miracles Ran Cold, pictured. Judging by the scenes of the young girls in a carniaval-esque, dreamlike atmosphere, wandering through forests, Peter-Toltz’s childhood- both real and idealised- seems magical, rendered in a delightfully colourful palette.’
About 'Prologues' By Rocío García Nuez
Cuban artist and professor at The Academy of Bellas Artes in Havana, Cuba.
' Marie exploits very interesting pictorial resources, mixing an expressionistic painting style together with a subtle romantic atmosphere, thereby her work is able to engage with an atypical form of spirituality that is of our ‘modern times’, and this is precisely why they exhale the precious scent of authenticity.’
PROLOGUES (Sydney Exhibition, February 2012)
Artist Statement, by Marie Peter-Toltz, 2012
The works exhibited in ‘PROLOGUES’ are concerned with portraying figures in both implied and nuanced autobiographical narratives and invented pictorial spaces where fact and fiction are mixed. By exploring intimate scenes of my past put into both allegorical and contemporary settings, I am playing with the idea of time, memory and the relationship between our actual past, our memories of our past, and the residue of feelings and emotions from our past that make us who we are today.
While the subject of childhood is a theme that informed my previous exhibitions, this time I wanted to focus mainly on variations of a single protagonist who interacts with the viewer’s gaze. In exploring her fragile and varied emotional and psychological states, a colorful and contrasted palette evolved for this smaller scale series of paintings. Fusing real-life models, photographs, and the memory of myself as a child, utilizing real spaces as well as imagined rooms and worlds, each painting is a hybrid image that both corresponds to reality and is opposed to it.
This process was new and fresh for me: using drawings and studies in meticulous preparation before employing a method of stream of consciousness while painting, bright colors, shapes and images emerged, the melancholic figures appeared, surprising atmospheres evolved, paintings were destroyed and reinvented, until what remained is the actual physical objects that are the paintings you see now in this exhibition.
Supposing I Dreamt This (exhibition 2010)
Originally published in 'The Leader', South Australia, September 29, 2010
'Marie Peter-Toltz explores female sexuality through her series of oil paintings in 'Supposing I dreamt this' at Salon Rouge Gallery, Kapunda from October 5.Born in France in France in 1981, she has lived, studied and worked in Australia, New York, and Madrid (...,...) The collection includes twenty artworks. Marie draws her inspiration from 1950's French magazines, old masters, marginal and found images, and contemporary media.Marie works with life models to express her ideas such as fantasy, sexual impulses and dreams. The canvasses are layered with these references and varying emotional pitches that take them beyond the more prediclable genre of the nude. The most esquisite celebrations of flesh and the female form you are likely to see in a contemporary artwork are to be found in this exhibition. Marie Peter-Toltz invites us to explore the 'Wild Child' or 'L'enfant Sauvage' aspect of our selves and enjoy the outer limits of our own feminity. Images online from September 15. (...,...)
Supposing I Dreamt This (exhibition 2010)
by Elizabeth Henson, The Herald Barossa, October 5, 2010
Are images of the naked human body offensive?
This question was raised last week when a poster showing a half-naked woman was displayed in a shop window in Kapunda. The advertisement aimed to promote Salon Rouge Gallery’s latest art exhibition and displayed a woman with naked breasts, dressed only in underwear. The painting shown on the poster was by French artist Marie Peter-Toltz. Gallery director Jacqueline Coates said she has removed the poster amid concerns it may offend some people. “We put the image up on Saturday morning and hadn’t had any issues whatsoever, however when I was in the supermarket a lady spoke to me about how she felt about the poster being up,” she said. “The woman was objecting to seeing breasts on the poster in the street. She feels that she doesn’t want her children to see that and to walk past it.”Ms Coates said she respects and appreciates feedback from the community and decided to take down the poster.Ms Peter-Toltz, whose work is shown on the poster, said her work aims to celebrate the human form.“I’ve never intended to upset people and make anyone unhappy about (my paintings),” she said. “It came naturally in the creative process and I never actually even considered that it could upset someone, and now it’s a new element for me as well, as an artist, to think about how the human body can be confrontational. ”The matter also brought up the issue of censorship in art. “If you were to censor Michelangelo while he was painting the Sistine Chapel and said ‘don’t put naked people in it’ it wouldn’t be one of the most beautiful things that a human has done,” Ms Peter-Toltz said. Ms Coates also backed this view. “The media controls a lot of images, movies control a lot of images, and the artists are the philosophers and thinkers of society,” she said. “They’re willing to explore the themes that are not explored so much and then they take it back into the mainstream by showing it so it’s a form of communication.” Ms Peter-Toltz’s paintings and Filomena Coppola’s Wildflower Series will be shown at Salon Rouge Gallery until November 28. It is the first time the Kapunda gallery has presented an international artist.
Marie Peter-Toltz’s exhibition, 'Supposing I Dreamt This' explores female identity in parallel with the concept of 'L’enfant Sauvage' (The Wild Child). The oil paintings are in a dialogue with images from 1950s French magazines, old masters paintings, contemporary images found in newspapers and magazines, and marginal found images. Each painting in this new body of work contains a fusion of repressed sexual impulses, fantasies and overt sensuality.
Through analyzing gestures and sensations, Marie Peter-Toltz also explores the conflict between the Self and reality. In paintings such as 'Impulses' and 'I Can’t Remember How it Started', Marie used multiple panels to investigate the disassociation of the body and the mind.
'VARIATIONS ON FEMALE FORMS', by Ashleigh Wilson
Originally published in 'THE AUSTRALIAN', October 16, 2009
Marie Peter-Toltz, a figurative painter based in Sydney rarely stays still for long. Peter-Toltz, the wife of Australian Booker-shortlisted author Steve Toltz, was born in France and studied in Europe before moving to Australia in 2004. During the past year she travelled to Paris twice to work in artist residencies, and she will be on the move again after receiving an artist grant from the Vermont Studio Center in the US. Her Latest exhibition 'Enigma Variations', at Art at Home Gallery in Balmain, Sydney, - is the result of the time spent in a range of different spaces across Paris exploring ideas of the female body and sexuality, an evolution from her previous body of work on motherhood and children. "Increasingly, I became my own subject," she says. The exhibition which opened last night, runs until November 8.
Enigma Variations (exhibition 2009)
by Chelsea Lehmann (South Australian based artist and lecturer)
'Peter-Toltz often explores binary ideas, tensions that we confront in our daily lives like strength and uncertainty, the extraordinary and the banal. In her paintings these binaries sometimes co-exist; their juxtaposition evoking the natural ambiguities and paradoxes we see and feel around us.
The lustre and physicality of paint carries meaning and Peter-Toltz uses the full weight of this medium with an innate curiosity and sensuality. These paintings reflect her desire to combine the subject with the inherent authority of the paint itself and in doing so create new pictorial worlds for our contemplation'.
Enigma Variations (exhibition 2009)
By Anora Borra (Artist Painter, France)
'Peter-Toltz’s paintings invite us into an complex universe of fluctuation and unsteadiness; characters in danger of collapse. Marie opens her doors to the entrance of a universe full of melancholic irony, baroque interiors and bohemian atmospheres, to explore the psychological world of the women and children she paints. The provoca- tion in the art of Marie Peter-Toltz comes from this capacity of re-inventing the representation of the female body, so many times seen in art history, in a way that is uniquely her own'.