Tony Toscani

Spring 2021

JUXTAPOZ

What a Day for a Daydream

“I need to put everything on hold for about a year,” Tony Toscani told me when we met at his Brooklyn studio early in 2020 and talked about life, art practice, and plans for the future. After cleaning the cyber dust from that conversation, put on hold like so many in 2020, we started looking back at Tony’s work and how his engrossed characters feel so relevant, his solitary “daydreamers” more relatable. Distanced from anyone in their proximity or captured alone at an unspecified location, their distractions consume them to the point of being subsumed by their bodies, heads literally lost in thought. While we did enjoy visiting their melancholic vibe back in the day, the images now resonate with a whole new level of touching intensity.

Sasha Bogojev: I want to start off with the limbs…

Tony Toscani: How they’re exaggerated and such? Well, I think at first it was definitely not planned.

A serendipitous mistake?