ARTIST TOUR | Pier Toffoletti

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Face Splash 1-2 by Pier Toffoletti 

Pier Toffoletti 

Art runs in the Toffoletti family, oftentimes as gifts flow through generations it is not surprising for that talent to be even greater. Toffoletti’s grandfather also had a knack for the arts. This clear need to create and chase the fire of art down to its necessary end has Pier using his money for art supplies instead of trading cards, games and other Italian adolescent boy desires. 

His early dedication shows with just one glance at Face Splash 1-2. Pier’s precision and eye are undeniable. After all, his earliest influence was Michaelangelo, whose works he would redraw a boy and would later recreate in art school as a young adult. 

Life took Toffoletti in so many different directions from radio station ownership, to caving, scuba diving, photography, graphic design, advertising film and cartoon making (with a dedicated studio) until it was all too overwhelming. When this was apparent to him he sold his radio stations and devoted himself to the painting he knew and loved as a boy. His time out in nature before rededicating himself to art is what inspires his creative process now, down to deep compulsions to recreate natural surfaces.

Pier needed the myriad of experiences that took him off the beaten path to eventually bring him back. These experiences are why his art exists in the lens from which a collector can view it. As it were, art is how Pier unearths what has been buried in him especially through his years as a speleologist studying caves. 

Both George Inness and Marc Chagall, artists from the 1800’s speak to Toffoletti’s philosophy of how nature is the epicenter of creativity.  When George Inness said, “The true use of art is, first, to cultivate the artist’s own spiritual nature.” And Marc Chagall piggy backed some time later with, “Great art picks up where nature ends.” 

With Toffoletti, the collector gets an artist who has both taken his time to cultivate his spiritual nature through the natural and pick up right where nature ends, in the most literal sense.