Toma-L: Mala Bestia

More about the book

“At the dawn of the new millenium, Thomas Labarthe discovered Jean Dubuffet at the Pompidou Centre. This posthumous encounter, through a retrospective, was ‘like an electric shock, but also a revelation’. Three months later, the young Labarthe painted Mala Bestia, his first canvas. ... Since then, Toma-L has been painting intuitively, freely, on the fringes of the conventions, concentrating on his gut and his technique. With dissolute figures and tense lines and shapes, the painter has created a world of small, restless, turbulent people, drawn in charcoal on paper or canvas. From installations in Tunisia and frenetic book projects in Marseille to self-taught charcoal lithographs and his impulsive exhibitions: in this first monograph, the artist Toma-L and author Théophile Pillault review two decades of unbridled creativity.”--Page 4 of cover