Paradise Circus Painting

At the crossroads between abstract and figurative, the show, which features a selection of the last three series of works made between 2017 and 2019, undertakes a journey in the bizarre universe of urban periphery, in the attempt to allegorically recompose the devastating effects of junk invasion and consumerism on our living space. Edith Torony’s works allude to any peripheric urban area of our globalized world: what mostly strikes in these almost surrealist compositions, with insertions of pop art, is their strange and familiar air. While looking at them, you cannot but recognize objects, fragments or just allusions to everything that in our urban space is identified as surplus, useless or superfluous. That is, the reminiscences of consumerism, of which we don’t know how to get rid of as soon as possible, and which, most of the times, end by being exiled at the margins of our world, extra muros. From 2012 on, Edith Torony has been observing, as a kind of urban behaviour investigator, the destiny of these objects out of use, exiled and forgotten at the periphery, but her survey does not stop there. What would it be like if all these reminiscences of our daily waste would recompose by themselves a world of their own? What would they say about us if they would be recovered in a recycle bin of memory? Edith Torony’s works recompose exactly this world, in a sort of archaeology of urban periphery: a bizarre and irresistible beauty sparkles from these chaotic landscapes, peopled as they are with objects that attract the eye, similarly as the glowing wrappers with which we pack the goods of our world, dreams included. In this new context, these pieces of reality, once meaningful, seem meaningless today, engaged as they are in a kind of magic dance, floating in their mesmerising singularity, caught in a limbo of desires: unexpectedly, the artist’s game slips in a new zone, where every fragment tells its own story, in an ode to contemporary chaos and the unconscious, speaking on different voices. Fascinating and slightly terrifying, at the same time. Curator: Irina Ungureanu