Meet me where the wild things grow III Drawing

An entropic temptation of explosion is the hidden engine of Edith Torony’s paintings, animated by a sense of motion and speed that seems to have migrated there from the frenzy of how our lives looked like until one year ago. The starting point of Edith’s artistic investigation is urban imagery, understood in terms of a conglomerate of what defines our consumerist behaviour. But what if our world would be peopled exclusively with the remains of what we consume and then leave away? What if the packaging of our insatiable impulse to devour and then throw away would start telling its own story? Surreal, both familiar and bizarre, Edith Torony’s paintings show the immediate aftermath of an almost apocalyptic party, where guests just left and the rests of their cosmic hunger and desire are still floating around in a chaotic dance. With rare exceptions, characters are almost always missing from the main scene depicted in Torony’s works: objects are at the forefront of the scene, and yet the impact of human absence is as strong as it were visible. When a human form can be noticed, as it is the case with Queen of Desire, it is that of a mannequin, as if artificiality would have turned to be the new communication and dressing code. Synthetic Future, Paradise Circus, Battleground of Desire, Cosmic Junk Food – the titles of the works speak for themselves when it comes to understanding what lies behind the objectual congestion so characteristic of Edith’s paintings. With some surrealist and pop art references and soft inserts that recall comic art, and definitely with a strong and sharp personal style, Edith Torony has all the premises to add a new perspective on the visual depiction of today’s consumerist patterns. Irina Ungureanu