Woman in Brown Pants

Tony Toscani is a figurative painter whose work examines the monotony and dissociation of contemporary life. He received his MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2011. Stylistically, Toscani’s figures recall those of Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, or Fernando Botero, but he imbues them with a sense of social anxiety and existential dread. His elongated figures with tiny heads appear absentminded or dreamy as they contemplate a cup of coffee or hunch over an open laptop. Alone even in a crowd, his figures embody the apathy and alienation of digital life, where screen time has come to overpower genuine human interaction. Technological devices like smartphones and computers often feature in Toscani’s works, but even the compositions that lack digital devices achieve the same isolating effect through the figures’ melancholic expressions and awkward body language.