Words and
writings

The strange poetic words strewn all over Tobiasse’s paintings and drawings were as important to him as the pencil and paint strokes. They were an integral part of his work, extending rather than explaining it. Here simple titles, there quite long sentences mixed up with the coloured strokes… A phantasmagoria bringing snippets of memory to the surface, springs of hope, little indulgences “to invent his life”.

A major means of expression and the very essence of Tobiasse’s work, the Saint-Paul de Vence sketchbooks are a mass of creative intimacy, a jumble of writing, drawings and phrases that came into being in the dreams of the night or the fringes of the day between 1993 and 2001. Luminous moments made from silence and solitude, they sprang up at unexpected moments, higgledy-piggledy, in waves. Veritable diaries of pure and free creation, they were filled over the days and nights, regardless of the time or the moment. He wrote, drew, sketched and painted in these sketchbooks in Saint-Paul de Vence, New York, Venice and Jerusalem, those places of passion and magical inspiration that he preferred. Time was on standby and emotions became dreams, the stuff of exaltation and excitation.