Nicola Toffolini. Tenacious Details. Gestures of Empirical Lyricism

Testi di Lorenzo Balbi, Annalisa Sacchi, Nicola Toffolini ISBN: 9788870386059 pp. 288, ill b/n 41, col. 96 17x24 cm Cartonato year 2026 price: € 40
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Born in Udine in 1975, Nicola Toffolini graduated in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice in 2000. Together with artist Eva Geatti, he founded Cosmesi, an experimental interdisciplinary theatre company.
This catalogue seeks to convey the full scope of a complex artistic practice, bringing to light aspects that remain concealed through the mere observation of the works themselves. At the heart of Toffolini's research lie two parallel yet deeply interconnected paths: nearly thirty years devoted to visual art and more than twenty years of experimental theatre. Often perceived as separate fields, his artistic practice and theatrical work reveal, throughout the book, a profound continuity: experiences gained in theatre inform his studio practice, while visual inspirations feed into collaborative theatrical projects.
The book is structured around four major cycles of drawings produced over the past fifteen years — Sezioni [Sections], PòST, Paesaggi Utopici [Utopian Landscape], Geoidi / Atolli [Geoids / Atolls] — interspersed with "fragments" and stage projects. Here, drawing is not a narrative device but an exhaustive, performative practice: the insistent layering of marks becomes a physical manifestation of time, much as in live performance, transforming the accumulation of gestures into the very substance of the work. Making is no longer the linear translation of an idea into its execution; instead, it takes shape in the physicality of a living gesture, becoming both presence and an accumulation of visible time — on the surface of the paper as much as in the space of the stage. Guided by a profound source of inspiration — evoking figures marked by radical solitude, from Werner Herzog to Sylvain Tesson, and extending to Octavia Butler's notion of "positive obsession" — these pages bear witness to an uncompromising attitude and an absolute fidelity to oneself. It is an artistic process that demands perseverance and solitude, yet necessarily remains open to the intrusion of the unforeseen. Throughout the catalogue, the extended, horizontal development of the major drawing cycles is continually intersected by sudden "verticalities": commissioned works, site-specific interventions, workshops and projects originating elsewhere. These deviations do not compromise the discipline underpinning the work; rather, they demonstrate how the unexpected can inhabit and permeate a coherent research process without disrupting its integrity.
The catalogue is enriched by an extensive section of Appendices, which which sum up nearly three decades of the artist's work.
The book also features critical essays by Lorenzo Balbi on Toffolini's visual art and by Annalisa Sacchi on his theatrical practice. These complementary perspectives convey the scope, consistency and profound unity of an artistic journey that cannot be contained within a single form.