I identify myself as a 37-year-old Caucasian male who creates images which arise from my dreams, my nightmares, my fantasies, and my sometimes-cynical perception of the reality that surrounds me. Through my images I try to arouse, like a tightrope walker, mixed emotions, without falling into a kind of gratuitous provocation.
Guillaume Toffel
After having focused my work in recent years on classic illustration based on black inking, my current images are more experiential. I try to break the boundaries between different mediums such as sculpture, painting, photography as well as digital image retouching. This is to define a more personal way of expressing my internal visions.
In the manner of certain art brut artists, as well as painters of the free figuration movement such as the French artist Robert Combas, the images that I create are the result of an instinctive creative process. In this way I immerse myself in the present moment of creation in order to avoid a process of rationalization that tends to lock up my creativity and to self-censor myself. This creative process thus allows me to raise personal themes such as addiction, sexuality or self-destruction.
Jumbo Head — Mix media: drawing , sculpture, photography
double page 42 x 59 cm
Lone Wolf — Mix media: drawing , sculpture, photography
double page 42 x 59 cm
The Tree of Life — Mix media: sculpture, photography
42 x 29 cm
It Comes at Night — Mix media: sculpture, photography
42 x 29 cm
I'm Coming! — Mix media: sculpture, photography
42 x 29 cm
Having initially had the objective of exhibiting my work in an art gallery, the current difficulties related to COVID-19 have prompted me to redefine my objectives in terms of how to present my work to an audience and thus exist artistically: In this sense, I worked, during the fall of 2020, on a portable art gallery project which consists of a self-published book featuring my different works in order to sell them online.
Medium:
Self-published bookSize:
42 x 59 cm
A Life by Proxy — Mix media: drawing, photography
double page 42 x 59 cm
A Life by Proxy — Mix media: drawing , sculpture, photography
double page 42 x 59 cm
A Life by Proxy — Mix media: drawing , sculpture, photography
double page 42 x 59 cm
A Life by Proxy — Mix media: drawing , sculpture, photography
double page 42 x 59 cm
Sketch — Ball point pen
42 x 29 cm
This work finds its contextualization in the fact that I spent my last year in my hometown in Switzerland. During this period when the world got off to a halt, the only thing that gave me the illusion of some kind of normality was being able to watch ice hockey games on TV with my dad. These moments spent with my father plunged me back into a nostalgia for my childhood that I used as the raw material for my own creative work. I have now created a self-published book dealing with my childhood memories of ice hockey games. It consists of a kind of memory archive work consisting of texts, drawings and photographed sculptures.