Marjan Toomar

In Marjan Toomar’s paintings, figures never fully take shape, nor do they ever completely disappear. Bodies emerge from layers of thick paint and gestural strokes at precisely the moment when the structures that hold them in place—the composition of the scene and the boundaries of the figure itself—begin to dissolve before the viewer’s eyes. This persistent suspension between formation and collapse arises from the convergence of two strategies: a reliance on pre-existing compositions from the history of painting as an underlying framework, and their execution through an immediate visual language in which paint is not merely a vehicle for representation, but a record of the very event of painting.

Within the context of her practice, this suspension between formation and collapse is not merely a formal choice, but returns to a question around which her work is shaped: collective memory and its mechanisms. Events such as war are not singular; they have occurred repeatedly in different forms, yet what remains of them within collective consciousness is always partial and selective. The consequences, details, and lived texture of an event are subject to erasure and transformation in the process of remembering, and what is remembered is never identical to the event itself. In Toomar’s paintings, the image takes shape under a similar condition: the canvas is not a fixed and complete representation of an event, but a site in which the image is simultaneously constructed and lost. The figure emerges in paint only to recede back into it; lines take shape, yet their boundaries remain unstable. From this perspective, the dissolution of the image is not merely an expressive effect, but part of the logic of the painting itself: just as memory preserves something and loses something else in the process of remembering, the image, in the process of being painted, reveals something even as it obscures something else. What remains is not a complete reconstruction of the event, but a trace of it within the image’s perpetually unfinished state.

Here, the image acquires meaning precisely at the point where it resists being fixed. The figures are neither fully present nor entirely absent; they remain suspended within an unstable distance between appearing and disappearing. What remains on the canvas is not a complete memory of an event, but the trace of the process of remembering: something that, each time it returns, reveals one part of itself while losing another. In Toomar’s paintings, this incompleteness is not a deficiency of the image, but its mode of presence.