Niele Toroni born in 1937 in Locarno-Muralto. Lives and works in Paris.

In 1967 on the occasion of the Salon de la Jeune Peinture in Paris, Toroni with Buren, Mosset and Parmentier presented themselves polemically as "not painters" with a collective exhibition in which the chromatic and compositional rules were shaken by the attempt to return to a methodical and primordial painting.

The radical nature and the desire to return to the zero degree characterize the works of the Swiss artist Toroni since the very beginning. The lack of subjectivity and narration of his own experience or of the external reality highlights a decisive recovery of the very essence of the artistic gesture. Toroni’s method, never changed since 1967, and is as simply as the application of colour on a flat surface - which might be canvas, paper, journal, wall or wood - of the impressions of a brush n ° 50 at regular intervals of 30 centimetres. He concentrates painting into a simple elementary action which does completely without narrative or invention.
The uniformity of his method is given by the spatial continuity of the distance (30 cm) and by the mechanical gesture of the artist that defines an unmistakable formal rhythm.
Like this, painting becomes only a means to express its own materiality, that differs only for colours and surface. To a systematic, rhythmic and geometric work, the precisely repetition of the impression counterpoises the infinite possibilities of variation leads to the diversification of the work itself. “Niele Toroni repeats his brush footprint in time and space. And is never the same thing, because the same is the same and the same is irreducibly dissociated from being identical.”
(Harald Szeemann)

“My biggest utopia or, if you prefer, my biggest foolishness is to believe that there is still the possibility to do something after Pollock without using pre-existing forms, either by valuing or by depreciating them.” (Niele Toroni)