Tobiasse

This catalogue is an invitation into the world of Théo Tobiasse (Jaffa, 1927 - Cagnes-sur-Mer, 2012). It traces his journey between tears and laughter, sunshine and darkness, intimate family moments and the heartache of exile, but always parelleled with incredible hope in life, a quest for heavenly light and the light of the soul.
Tobiasse’s favourite themes reappear throughout his work like incantations: woman, mother or lover, omnipotent mistress, carrier and receptacle of all desire, travel, exile, referential towns: Paris, New York, Venice and Jerusalem.
Circuses, musicians and acrobats, mythological and biblical subjects resonate at the heart of this profusion of creativity, punctuated by the artist’s writings.
Tobiasse expresses his emotions in two or three dimensions, from the lightest collage to the monumental bronze or concrete sculpture, from the delicateness of a wash laid down on paper, to the thick vigorous paste of a canvas saturated with colour, and even down to his palette that had become a mountain of matter, a kind of fantastical landscape of which only the artist knew the secrets.

Vallauris, Musée Magnelli, June - October 2017