In the novel Jude the Obscure, published in London in 1885, Thomas Hardy tells the story of the life and struggles of a young man from the humblest classes of Victorian England. Raised in the harsh labor of the countryside, he dreams of redemption through knowledge and learning. His drive for emancipation, pursued as a self-taught student, is sparked by the sight from a hill near his home, where, in the evening, he can gaze upon the impalpable glow of a distant city—home to an ancient and prestigious university—that promises to quench his thirst for knowledge and welcome him as a student. Jude returns to that hill repeatedly, seeking once more that luminous aura that, in the evening mist, gently dissolves the darkness of night, opening up the magnificent dream of the distant city—a vision both fantastical and tangible, nourishing his longing for knowledge: “As the halo had been to his eyes when gazing at it a quarter of an hour earlier, so was the spot mentally to him as he pursued his dark way. — ‘It is a city of light,’ he said to himself. — ‘The tree of knowledge grows there,’ he added a few steps further on. […] — ‘It would just suit me.’” 

Rui Toscano’s language evokes distant and ancestral cultural archetypes—not in search of their precise manifestation in the present, but rather the echo of their symbolic value. Throughout his practice, he has consistently sought a synthesis between the concrete elements of human cultural history and their otherworldly, cosmological inspiration. This search for synthesis has taken shape in a minimalist visual tradition, emphasizing the relationship between light and its ability to manifest across time and space as a tool for knowledge and connection with deeper realities. 

Within this exploration, light assumes a central role—not only as a pulsating medium of revelation and existential inspiration, as suggested by Jude’s yearning in Thomas Hardy’s narrative, but also as a structuring element of the artwork itself. Toscano thus explores light’s sculptural capacity to shape space and influence perception over time, playing with the boundary between presence and absence, manifestation and dissolution. 

In his new solo exhibition at Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, the artist expands this investigation, drawing inspiration from the figure of Ra, one of the principal deities of ancient Egypt, a symbol of the sun at its peak. Ra was not merely the personification of sunlight but a cosmic force governing the cycle of life and energy in the universe. According to Egyptian theology, his daily journey across the sky and through the underworld represented the eternal rhythm of creation, death, and rebirth. The sun, in its progression from dawn to dusk, became the measure of time, the ordering principle of reality, and the bridge between the visible and the invisible. 

Toscano appropriates this concept—so distant and elusive as to seem almost abstract—and transforms it into the concrete and precise forms of a perceptual experience. At the center of the exhibition are four drawings projected as luminous images, shifting in chromatic tone and intensity in response to the natural light entering the exhibition space. The geometric figures composing these works—two partially overlapping rectangles, a rhombus intersected by two opposing triangles, three circles of increasing size, and a sectioned hemisphere—appear as signs of extreme Euclidean purity, devoid of narrative elements. Yet, it is precisely their essentiality that keeps them open to multiple interpretations: they may evoke star maps, astronomical diagrams, or models of celestial bodies captured at a single moment in their cosmological life. It is the absence of concrete references that allows these forms to remain open to the suggestion of something primordial, like ancient constructions or esoteric monuments lost in time and space.

If these works ultimately reflect on light as an expression of form, they also serve as vehicles for a broader intuition, one that approaches the realm of the sacred with the rigor of a secular spirituality. Toscano seems to engage with ancient conceptions of light—not only as a source of illumination but as a fundamental principle of the universe. In 12th-century medieval philosophy, the concept of the "metaphysics of light" expressed the insight of thinkers such as Robert Grosseteste and Bonaventure, who saw light as the primary form of matter, the substance through which the world was ordered and imbued with meaning. From this perspective, light was not merely a physical phenomenon but an essential ontological principle, capable of generating and transforming reality—and, consequently, shaping humanity’s role within it. The very idea of the human was molded by this vision, framed in a theological and creaturely dimension to which all reason and reality could be traced.

Similarly, in Toscano’s works, light is not merely a physical manifestation but an entity that generates space and meaning, reverberating a meditative value that can be individually interpreted. The continuous variation in the tone of the projections, influenced by natural light, introduces an element of instability that highlights the relationship between time and perception. The forms are never fixed; they transform with changing luminous conditions, evoking the cyclical nature of cosmic phenomena even before the ephemeral character of human life. Toscano’s projections seem to suggest a path of contemplation and self-detachment as a form of secular asceticism. The evocation of abstract and indefinite geometries, submerged in the continuous mutability of light, conjures an image of a place where the ordinary dimensions of time and space are transcended, and the objects populating memory and life dissolve their contours. It is a scenario that leaves space for a hypothetical city of light—the very thing Jude sought in Thomas Hardy’s novel to unlock his inner vocation, pursued with rigor and individual strength.

Complementing the exhibition are four paintings of varying formats, each executed in a primary color. Unlike the projections, these works focus entirely on the intensity of color and its optical dominance. However, Toscano’s initial compositional process for these pieces, which began in the form of a cosmologically inspired minimalism that has characterized a significant part of his pictorial practice, has evolved over weeks of work, gradually incorporating natural elements inspired by vegetal forms into the abstraction of the chromatic surface. More significantly, for the first time, a new threshold opens within the artist’s paintings: the emergence of human figures—almost as if they were spectators of the very pictorial landscapes appearing on the canvas. As a result, the works lose their previous evanescence to gain imaginative depth and acquire a narrative dimension. This development resonates with an earlier trajectory of Toscano’s research, which began in the 1990s with the collection of science fiction books from around the world, published up until the previous decade, photographing their covers and reinterpreting them using slide projectors. The aesthetics of science fiction novels from the 1960s to the 1980s reflected a kaleidoscope of iconic styles ranging from Cubism to Surrealism—imagery created on commission by artists operating between the worlds of science and the fantastic.

This very intersection of fields and territories is a key element in understanding Toscano’s practice, which explores overlapping and unidentifiable temporal planes, offering vantage points onto distant cultural periods, obsolete technological aspirations, and scientific paradigms distinct from those of today. His paintings function as unpredictable time machines, suspended instruments of perception, oscillating between the present moment and the echoes of remote worlds, where the rhythm is set by an experience that delves into the depths of time and collective cultural memory.

Luigi Fassi

March 2025