When Ori Toor sat down to make his Gibberish series of paintings, he usually had only one image or wandering narrative to start working. Tel Aviv-based illustrator, excellent artist and animator said he was always surprised by what would happen next and “never been like I thought.”
“I’m not even sure I have the imagination,” Toor said. “Or maybe my process of imagining became fully visual: I need to draw and see things in order to imagine new things. Things happen on the canvas and not in my head so much. It’s really important for me to stay surprised. I don’t see much point in making anything that I can predict. If I feel like that’s happening: I will immediately cause a happy accident, like erasing something important or adding a random element that ‘ruins’ the work, and see what happens next.”
Toor’s freelancer’s job documented this record of a preference for improvisation, whether it’s Nike’s exciting multi-component advertising, illustrations from cable magazines or one of his animation projects. All of this shows that an artist stands out in Chaos. But the Gibberish series is the most vivid implementation of his dynamic stories that create a whole page that traverses dynamic stories and provides multiple admissions and explanations. The mysterious machine paves the landscape with familiar forms and abstractions, with miniature and towering characters appearing nearby. Toor can create a sense of cohesion to some extent through the viewer’s assumptions, even if not through the palette or intersecting lines, even if all of them are part of a single puzzle, even if not. In recent years, the official title of the work that was run has been given a formal name, but he said it was “an improvement on what I have been doing for years: basically careful graffiti.”
