Toni van Tiel NL, 1979

Artist Toni van Tiel is a sculptor on paper. His works are two-dimensional, but he builds his works up as if the whole public space arises from the paper. In his drawings, he creates monuments, fountains, and roundabouts: sculptures in imaginary public spaces. ‘They are reduced sculptures. In drawings, the structure doesn’t have to be correct.’ Toni feels no need to realize these sculptures in three dimensions. They exist on paper, and the viewer’s imagination does the rest.

Ideas for the drawings come to him intuitively. ‘I’ll be riding on my bike and think about a single romanesco broccoli being grown on a farm. I’d love to walk through the city and come across all sorts of unexpected things, for instance because a city planner has been playing around with an endless amount of streetlamps, benches and trash cans. Humour plays a big role in my work; that comes automatically to me. But my drawings also have a certain itching power.’ That itching comes from a slight collision in the image which indicates the absurdity of the situation. You see an enormous sculpture proposed by Toni in one of his drawings and imagine how the diminutive passersby would gawk at it rather artlessly. Until you realize: those people are us.