Peres Projects is pleased to present Brand New Love, an exhibition of new paintings by Daniele Toneatti (Venice, 1989), which marks the artist's debut with the gallery and his first solo exhibition in Italy. Blurring boundaries is central to Daniele Toneatti's artistic practice. In Brand New Love figuration dissolves into abstraction and technical virtuosity coexists with intuitive and visceral languages. The oil paintings, reminiscent of crude charcoal sketches, stand in a state of permanent incompleteness, alongside other completed and subsequently reworked works. The very process of creating paintings is atomized, with each of its constituents receiving equal attention and importance. Like the pieces of a puzzle, drawing, color and subject are reworked in myriad combinations, while the artist's studio seems to infiltrate the exhibition space. Influenced by postmodern approaches and theories, for which interpretation transcends creation, Toneatti cultivates a singular practice of appropriation. The artist collects found images, ranging from archival photographs to art historical references, and paints them by remixing and sampling them into a complex body of work. In just before they split (2023), Toneatti paints a photograph of a framed painting by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. In his interpretation of the French Rococo painter's composition, blurred and rough brushstrokes emphasize the transitory and sensual nature of the embrace, obscuring the identification of the source image. In Classic Impression (2023), however, Toneatti recreates a photograph of an overweight boy sitting on the beach through a romantic lens. Here, his delicate brushstrokes and pastel color imbue the image with a tenderness and charm reminiscent of the work of post-impressionist painter Pierre Bonnard. In doing so, Toneatti engages with a line of artists who imagine a renewed way of making art by reformulating, restaging and reinterpreting existing images to produce new contexts and meanings. “Underneath a picture there is always another picture,” wrote Douglas Crimp in October in the spring of 1979, reflecting on the Pictures exhibition he curated two years earlier, introducing a new generation of artists later known as the Pictures Generation – a recurring source of interest to Toneatti. Just as the Pictures Generation recognized or reacted to the growing influence of mass media in shaping culture, Toneatti's practice resonates with current patterns of visual consumption in today's image economy. His body of work engages with the ubiquity of images in contemporary life, emphasizing their circulation across the current porous borders and hierarchies that once gave structure to cultural ecosystems. A permeability also evident in the formal diversity of the work itself. Brand New Love also illustrates the infinite stylistic variety of Toneatti's practice and the fluidity with which he moves from one pictorial language to another. As well as a reflection on our current image-driven society, Toneatti's work is a personal and passionate dialogue with the history of art. Each work captures an encounter with an image, translated onto the canvas through different pictorial approaches, free from pre-established formulas or solutions. The artist, who treats each painting like a page in a diary, excavates and records the images that remain in his memory, similar to retinal persistences, sometimes burying them under new layers of images. Works such as Don’t Look Now (2023) and Romantic Painting (2023) present a dense palimpsest-like surface, layered with a multitude of intertwining motifs that simultaneously erase and complete; in other works, such as flight of ideas (2023) and hard truths (2023), the canvas acts as a sketchbook, where the same motif is repeated and revised several times. In Toneatti's work, process and product have the same importance. His emphasis on the fragmented and unfinished harks back to Raphael Rubinstein's concept of "provisional painting", described in an article of the same name published in Art in America in 2009: works that seem "random, rushed, tentative, incomplete, self-nullifying". Embracing doubt and uncertainty rather than monumentality and permanence, Toneatti takes a humble approach. This is particularly evident in Venetian Red (2023), a painting derived from a photo of a photo of Cindy Sherman, taken during a retrospective of the American artist's work. The expanses of red hues that dominate much of the canvas are actually Toneatti's fingers partially but deliberately obscuring the camera lens. This image, captured furtively, holds a moment of devotion and shyness. In the exhibition space, the paintings are arranged in groups, encouraging free associations of images and ideas. Invisible links connect the works, forming mysterious constellations as the artist reveals his journey through visual culture and art history. While Toneatti's images exude a sense of déjà vu, many of the references he draws from remain elusive. This feeling of uncertainty releases the images from their limits, allowing the viewer to connect the works with his own mental image archive. Through processes of selection, assimilation, reformulation, Toneatti interrupts the flow of images that overwhelms us every day - Brand New Love embodies a renewed and even romantic way of absorbing images, inviting us to reflect on our personal iconographic pantheon. Brand New Love is Daniele Toneatti's first solo show with the Peres Projects gallery. Toneatti debuted with a solo exhibition at Open Forum in Berlin in 2023: entitled Das Ding, the exhibition explored the nihilism of images, questioning the flattening of culture and our aesthetic experiences.