 The Magic of Mercurio: an Artist at an Exhibition for Giuseppe Mercurio “I don’t know what I’m doing,” the artist reveals candidly from the podium. It is Giuseppe Mercurio’s first retrospective exhibition, curated by Francesca Valente at the Joseph D. Carrier Art Gallery in Toronto. We are surrounded by giant, colourful canvases, playful, instinctive, semi-abstract, gestural works; immense palimpsests of splash and scrape and shape and sgraffito, of asemic writing and graffiti and colour fields. The paintings are raw and intuitive. They are both ancient and ultra-contemporary, each one a kind of archeological dig that excavates old cities and cultures, treasures of cuneiform and intaglio, from a surface of the modern city and all of its flash and griffonage and neon signs. But the pulse is personal, too; we are wandering through the artist’s emotional landscape and imagination, a person of passion and frenzy, mischievous, driven, and outrageously creative. Mercurio’s parallel incarnation is that of chef and restauranteur. Almost thirty years ago, he opened Bar Mercurio on Bloor Street near the Royal Ontario Museum. It’s an intimate, rustic space centered around the classic long bar and a bountiful, glittering apothecary of bottles, serving spectacular pizza on sourdough, succulent duck pappardelle, and the best carpaccio in the world: grass-fed, drizzled with the oil of Sicilian olives and bright lemons. My initiation into Bar Mercurio was by chance, walking past after a lecture on science at the University of Toronto. It was late on a late summer evening and there was a free space on the patio. My date and I agreed that a glass of Mount Etna wine and a pizza seemed like a perfect nightcap. Stepping inside to visit the facilities, it was a series of intriguing paintings that stopped me in my tracks. These were bold and marvelous creations, magical mazes of colourful shapes and word fragments. They summoned Hans Hoffman, Gorky, Kline, Klee, De Kooning, Tapies, Twombly, and Basquiat, while wholly original to their maker. And yet, I recognized them as if looking into a mirror. Someone I did not know saw what I saw, was driven by similar aesthetics, a frantic, raw creativity amok with adventurous colour, messy beauty, fragmented dreams, scrawled words, numbers, and cryptic sigils. Our art was very different: this artist was much better and more advanced on his path; he worked on larger substrates; we both used acrylic media but mine used collage liberally and employed fewer drawings. But creatively, I knew that we were kindred spirits. I inquired as to the provenance of the paintings and was told it was the owner’s work. This was the only invitation I needed to centre Bar Mercurio as the restaurant to which I would return for every special occasion as the next eight years unfolded, feasting on calamari and spaghetti and salads with mixed greens and candied walnut morsels, and sampling my way through a gorgeously curated wine list. For many years before it stopped publishing, I wrote regularly on wine and art pairings and on food lore for Good Food Revolution, with wine, food, art and literature a holy tetrad of my personal and professional passions. Here at Bar Mercurio were all the things I loved most. To this day, we visit for enchanted dining at every anniversary or with guests from out of town. Back on that first night, my date returned to the patio after paying the cheque inside, and said, “Did you see the paintings? The art reminds me of you.” Perhaps it is gauche to put too much of the spotlight in a story of another artist’s work on one’s self. But the parallels in source, style, aesthetic and inspiration would be a glaring omission if not acknowledged. It was absolutely transformative to encounter the work of an artist who clearly experienced the world and the creative process with a mutual intensity, an artist who speaks in a similar language. I dreamed of seeing dozens of Joe’s paintings, and entering the Joseph D. Carrier gallery for his first retrospective, that dream came true. This exhibition is exquisitely curated by Francesca Valente. The spacious, palatial architecture and two-story showcase allows guests a journey with the paintings, with ample room to encounter each work. Grand, yet intimate. Up close and personal, each painting reveals a masterful medley of rich textures and movement, a buoyant dance of mark-making. You are submerged into joy and revelry, but there is a sardonic undertow, too, an alchemy where tension and anger are released into light. There is, too, poetry, and a spirit of play. It is often said that the key to unlock the ninety million dollar secrets of Mark Rothko’s works is to enter them physically and encounter them as a form of meditation. Rothko, the abstract expressionist, famously painted large-scale colour fields, simple rectangle blocks of contrasting colours. These consistently sell for tens of millions of dollars and are status symbols for collectors and museums. The secret is to stand in front of them and dissolve into the experience of the colour, to become one with them, if you will. Contemplating them in this way will deliver an emotional confrontation. Rothko himself stated, “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.” I enjoy the occasional Rothko immersion, but have never quite fallen under their spell. The high stakes commerce obliterates the spirit and simplicity of the contemplative experience that might make sense in its absence. Still, I am a champion of this technique: entering into art and surrendering to it, meditating on it, and allowing a profound connection, is the best way to experience art. It is a technique that proves a revelation with Mercurio’s canvases. It’s as if stepping outside of yourself is the ideal way to step inside of yourself. Communion here takes you into another realm, into the mystery of creativity. There is something essential that happens, that is, something of the essence, a spell where all that is enigmatic, where mystery itself, takes material form and becomes image. “By transcending any reference to contingent elements, Mercurio embraces a new realm in which the tangible and intangible become one, the outer and inner worlds appear as an unicum in a mental dimension which incorporates the past and the present simultaneously,” writes Valente in her curatorial statement. This magic cannot come from instruction. You might say that it can only be liberated. It is pure imagination and freedom. The artist must have a conviction of beauty, yet be in profound embrace with a wide and broad definition of such an elusive ideal. They must see beauty everywhere, so that they can show us, while being paradoxically unflinching in the face of terror and darkness, because here, too, is beauty, and some of the truth of the world. “Why do I paint and what do I paint?” For Mercurio, it is rhetorical question. “These inquiries have haunted me for a very long time and they have been a very tough code to crack. A copious mass of coats have been peeled away to glimpse at this existential matrix.” The Catalan painter Antoni Tapies has been profoundly influential in my own practice. Tapies saw creation as a ritual act, as a way of participating in and connecting with the consciousness of the universe and time. He loved to include humble materials, emulating the ordinary and overlooked aspects of the world, such as textures in sidewalk pavements or a discarded stick. Mark-making and graffiti to him were symbols and incantations. Repetition and all that is raw and elemental were aspects of, building blocks, of meditation and ways to plug in to the past and future. Attention and intention were spiritual or mystical matters, and being present for experience was the essential work of the artist, the spectator, indeed, anyone. He was interested most in a deep engagement with the materials he used. I have long used recurring symbols in my artwork, and perhaps the simplest of them is the X or the +, recurring motifs for Tapies as well. I see them elsewhere, of course, including in Mercurio’s paintings. The straightforward intersection of two lines has always resonated as deeply meaningful to me, suggestive of signature or being present (“X marks the spot”), of seeing inside something (“X-ray vision”), of lovers coming together (“xoxo”), of standing in for something else (“x+y”), of life (the ancient ankh of Egypt), of intersections and decisions (the crossroads), of declarative and decorative mark-making (graffiti), and of God and man uniting or Christ’s power over death (the Christian cross.) This is admittedly a lot to wrench from one humble mark, but there is just as much meaning in a circle, a stripe, a dot of orange, a spiral, a star. Every mark made by an artist participates in a complex, universal, multilayered symbolic code. It is not always a jigsaw puzzle to be meticulously pieced together, or to be deciphered, but rather, experienced on all levels, consciously or unconsciously. As Mercurio stated in his speech at the opening, “Only you, the viewer can complete the story on these canvases.” Images transcend the maker’s intention. They communicate from both the concrete and the liminal. Standing in the presence of Mercurio’s art is to be fully here, and fully “there” at once. It is the same sacred experience of entering into a cave of handprints and horse outlines in ochre and animal fat marked there by people who lived thousands of years in the past. An image is one way that we participate in eternity. By nature, I am sign-seeking and introspective, always linking the individual to the archetypal. I approach art with whole-hearted openness, expecting to be changed and transported. My appreciation is wildly diverse: I adore the meticulous draftsmanship prowess and rich symbolic language of still-life painting; I am swept away by the beauty and mythology blushing under the pre-Raphaelite’s brush; I love the opulent maximalism of the rococo and the high drama of Latin American colonial religious art. Perhaps I am most critical of the art that bears some resemblance to the aesthetics of my own work: I love street art, and yet feel most of it uninspired or driven by a hackneyed desire to shock. I feel that Picasso’s grandiose confidence gave way to spectacular innovation that paved the road for me and my collages, yet his inflated ego deterred him in some ways from growth. He never did master composition and most of his works evoke no emotions at all. (Acknowledging that I’m on thin ice here! Joe expressed to me, “Picasso said that it took him old age to finally pain like a child. I vibrate profoundly with this thought!”) Franz Kline’s sweeping gestures zing with the energy and movement of dance, but Jackson Pollock’s are muddy and too easy to replicate. Jean Michel Basquiat was a genius and the rhythms of his graffiti and pictorial improvisations reflect the fragmented ways that our minds manifest information, identity, and memory. But Julian Schnabel’s efforts at the same are discordant and empty. Mercurio’s art shares something with the best of these, all the while resisting labels. “I do not have any favourite artists,” he told me. “I am drawn obviously to the great American abstract artists, but I struggle with anyone in their entirety. I love individual paintings for the momentary idea shared.” In his artist statement, Mercurio says, “I detest the limits of being defined.” His art is pure instinct and conjure. Joe is a self-taught painter. In his speech, he states, “I am not a classically trained painter, I have had no formal training…However, I am committed to tirelessly paint.” His mentor was Uno Hoffman, a Swiss-born artist who lived here in Toronto. (I was shamefully not familiar with Hoffman’s artwork until I started cyberstalking Joe’s.) There is a compelling immediacy in self-taught work that I find irresistible: at its best, it embodies that which cannot be taught- freedom, instinct, imagination, ambiguity, rhythm, innovation, experimentation, exploration, expressiveness, nuance, paradox. Indeed, as Joe said to me, “My artistic process must be immediate.” He begins “with a canvas pinned to the wall.” Using acrylic paints and oil sticks, Mercurio starts with an undercoat and builds with brush and paint stick. “Painting is the medium I use to release something that resides inside of me which must be expressed. A cathartic release… painting depicts the inner nuances, emotions, feelings, etc. As such, they complete their journey and do not remain stuck within!” The self-taught artist must draw not from the particular school of thought inherent in his training, but from his own devices and the constellation of personal influences and interests. This is the richest environment for art to flourish. Mercurio’s work is vivid and emotional, thrumming and alive. He is a confident colourist, unafraid of unpredictable juxtapositions. His work pulses with flavours, with conversations, with cultures and cities and a roller-coaster spectrum of emotions. He draws from his Calabrese heritage and Toronto home, from the studio, from his family and the kitchen and his love of bicycling. His educational background in statistics and Italian language make an appearance, too, with layers of ambiguous script and mathematical calculations forming part of the texture of his art. Perhaps those who dine at the divine Bar Mercurio have front row centre insight into Joe’s art. At the helm of this restaurant, Joe is both exacting and freewheeling. Quality is first: only the best ingredients will do. He is an expert curator, bringing together flavours and ambiance that are experiential for his guests. There is a sense of tradition and the hospitality of the old world and family, with Mom on deck for quality control, and the warm and gorgeous Jackie to attend to our every creature comfort. Everything is expansive and generous, and every staff member is unique, contributing in their own way to the culture of the place. It is busy and noisy, yet the atmosphere is relaxed. The food is upscale and immaculate, yet you can come as you are and be comfortable. Perhaps Joe’s name holds some clues, too; the fleet-footed Mercury was the messenger of the gods, the Roman god of business, travelers, communication, and mischief. The word “mercurial” draws from this archetypal history and denotes passion, quick-thinking, intelligence, impulsivity, eloquence, and ingenuity. Joe strikes me as creative, clever, witty, intense, hard-working, ambitious, and over the top. He has a rich background of academic, artistic, and entrepreneurial endeavours, but even so, you can tell he is a live wire, operating almost entirely on instinct. On top of all that, there is a certain je ne sais quoi here: from my first visit to Bar Mercurio, I felt it was an oasis, an enchanted, inspired place. Everything here can equally apply to the experience of his art. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” he says. Only, clearly, he does. One foot in the old world, the other in the new and the now, and the rest in a different place entirely. Pure magic. Lorette C. Luzajic Visit Mercurio’s exhibition On New Ground until September 29, 2025 Joseph D. Carrier Gallery 901 Lawrence Avenue West, Toronto Artist website: https://www.studio1mercurio.com/about Visit Bar Mercurio: 270 Bloor Street West, Toronto https://www.barmercurio.com  A Pantomime with a Bugle (Giuseppe Mercurio, 2020)  Joe and Lorette.  The Algorithm in Delirium (Giuseppe Mercurio, 2019)   Pizza of the gods.
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 Toller Cranston and his dogs in Cabbagetown. Toronto Star Archives. Beyond the Beyond: Toller Cranston In my wildest days, I lived in a basement apartment on George Street in Toronto, just across from Allan Gardens, a botanical greenhouse and sketchy park where dog walkers, street walkers, and an assortment of addicts would convene to partake in the various mysteries of intoxication. The nearby pub, Pimblett’s, where I held the after-party for my wedding, and Walk on the Wild Side, a longstanding establishment for wigs and large sized ladies’ shoes, were classic haunts for transgender women and crossdressers. It was a neighbourhood frequented by a rare breed, old queens, the fey and the fabulous, if you will, those wonderfully flamboyant characters with a penchant for antiques and excess, for opera and old movie stars. One such personality was my neighbour Paul, known for his lawn chair perch surrounded by scraggly rhododendrons, decked to the hilt in festive fuchsia feather boas atop an old “wife beater” style tank shirt. Anyone and everyone was welcome to join him for a tumbler of Maria Christina, even before noon, or a sampling from assorted pills and powders served on a vintage Tiffany platter. You would be regaled with racy stories and scathing witticisms about passersby if you stayed. It was the same district where the enigmatic Toller Cranston was often seen in his big floppy hats and his fur capes, walking his spotted English setters. On one occasion when his beloved dog Minkus got lost and the locals helped find and return him home, Toller had thrown a party for them. “To show my appreciation…I had a cocktail party for all the people who had helped me: the drug addicts, the prostitutes, the pimps, and the mental patients from the streets…They were imperial. They were perfection. They were so helpful.”  Toller Cranston skates in front of Toronto's city hall in February, 1973. Fred Ross / Canadian Press Photo Toller Cranston was the charismatic Canadian icon best known for revolutionizing the world of figure skating. He was a virtuoso, internationally renowned athlete who took national champion of Canada six years running from 1971 to 1976. Though he “only” took the bronze medal in the Olympics and never made gold, his epic flights of fancy on ice changed history forever, turning the sport into art. If it smarted to evade the gold medal that many believe was rightfully his, Toller said it was a useful reminder that he always had something more to strive for. “I really wasn’t a competitor…The only person I was competitive with was myself.” And if the names of gold medalists often fade into forgetting, no one could forget Toller’s radical contributions. Certainly, he was keenly aware of what he had wrought. In his books, he refers to himself repeatedly as the Patineur du Siècle, the skater of the century, and he is right. Toller brought interpretive, full-bodied expression, dance, creativity, and musicality into the game. With his seemingly impossible choreography, exquisite high kicks, and spinning fluidity, he was known as Nijinksy on Ice. Indeed, the man who made theatre on the rink had started with ballet at the age of six. The hockey skates he was given as a child were meant to make a man of the boy who wanted to be a ballerina, but the young Cranston began inventing dances with them. His spectacular leaps and bounds were all the more astonishing when we consider that at age thirteen, he was diagnosed with Osgood-Schlatter, a condition of inflammation of the ligaments. He was told he would never skate again. But one thing the world came to know about Toller Cranston was that he never took no for an answer. In his autobiography, When Hell Freezes Over, Toller wrote: "The great moments in figure skating occur when a performer is true to his own nature, and puts his heart and soul on the line with no holds barred." This is what he gave to the ice, and to all of us, the entirety of his body and soul. In doing so, he changed the sport forever into art. With those impossible, arabesque arcs and arches, in skin-tight sequinned orange and aqua deep plunge V neck disco jumpsuits, he was dazzling and over-the-top. No one had ever seen anything like it. And we couldn’t keep our eyes off of him.  Toller Cranston's House in San Miguel, Mexico. Andrew Osta, CC BY-SA 4.0 Toller Cranston was a maximalist in every way, on and off the rink. Everything was dialled up to eleven. He was theatrical, smart, exaggerated, and snazzy. He glittered. He was the same eccentric character whether at work and at play. He was electric. By my day, he had retired from skating and sold the house he lived in two streets over, and all the treasures of his infamous clutter, enchanted old gewgaws and curiosities. Toller described his home as “rococo gone loco” and as part museum, part “bordello.” “I had a green Murano glass fountain that lit up, played music, spewed perfumed water, and changed colour,” he wrote in his memoirs, Zero Tollerance. “I had nine-foot-long Mexican Christ figures from the 18th century flying in the air. I had jewelled boxes; anything that would illuminate itself, marble columns that lit up; secret, strange things; magical things; wonderful things; terrible things; practically hideous things; exquisite things.” Waddingtons, where he loved shopping til dropping, recalled that he would scoop up every carved wooden cherub they had. “Toller was always on the hunt for the wild, the colourful, the outrageous, the beautiful and anything over the top,” wrote Duncan McLean in his eulogy at the auction house. “His favourite expression when he saw something he had to have was: ‘It’s beyond the beyond!’” Later, Waddingtons sold all those things for him. Toller took the money and ran, off to San Miguel in Mexico. There, he spent the next twentysomething years collecting a new assortment of baubles and handicrafts, and also, doing something else: painting. In fact, Toller Cranston considered himself an artist first. Skating was but one kind of art, collecting, another. All of it stemmed from his imagination as an artist, and painting was his primary expression. Toller described himself as a “painter who skates.” The San Miguel de Allende blog quotes him as saying, "We're all born with an inclination in the genes. Who we are, what we're supposed to do, it's in the DNA. I had full knowledge as to what my destiny was—my inclination—from a very early age. I was a painter." By the age of sixteen, Toller was a self-supporting artist. He did attend post-secondary studies at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Montreal, but he didn’t graduate. When his teachers told him there was nothing more he could learn there, he left. He was already using his professional painting to fund his costly ice-skating adventures. Still a teenager, he held exhibitions in his skating coach’s house. Barely 21, he had a major exhibition in Toronto. He considered himself a self-taught artist, and on his world skating tours, he visited the great museums everywhere. “That was my education,” he said. He learned how to paint from his skating artistry, too. “Something that I learned as a skater, and brought it into my painting, was the idea of rhythm and the never-ending line.” Our northern Nijinsky had more than enough accomplishments and contributions in figure skating, but they were a sideshow next to his life as a painter. He had been studying and creating visual art from the beginning, and until the day he died, in 2015, of a heart attack at the age of 65, he painted obsessively in his self-imposed exile to Mexico. Twelve hours a day, he said, seven days a week. He had several hundred solo exhibitions around the globe. The sheer volume of his output attests to such a schedule: in 2025, he told the Globe and Mail he had created over 30 thousand paintings, not including drawings and prints. The estimated number occasionally changed, being cited as 70 thousand in another interview. Most experts put the number at a minimum of over 20 thousand. And he sold them all. As a point of comparison, Pablo Picasso’s prolific output is estimated at 13 500, not counting prints and sketches, and Paul Klee meticulously logged his oeuvre to show close to 10 thousand works. Marc Chagall probably has around the same as Klee. Quantity meant something to Toller, who bedazzled every square inch of his homes, performances, and canvases with eclectic oddments and razzmatazz and curiosities. But quality mattered, too. He was driven by beauty and magic. And his paintings are spellbinding and masterful. For a man born into the drab gray industrial landscape of Hamilton, Ontario, Cranston’s art is inexplicably enchanted, with fantastical scenes and creatures, evoking Russian Orthodox ostentation, Croatian naïve art traditions, an aesthetic of opera, ballet, and fairy tales, Canadian woodland native art, colonial Spanish opulence, and Mexican shrines and folk art. His life and work personified the aesthetic of horror vacui, or “fear of an empty space.”  Photo of Toller Cranston with his art, taken a few days before his death in 2015. Andrew Osta, CC BY-SA 4.0 Sarah Hampson’s Globe article made much of Cranston’s colourful persona, patronizingly dismissing his theatricality as performative vanity. This fashionable reaction to Cranston is almost part of his legend. “Cranston is not so much an artist as a performance artist,” Hampson harrumphed. She emphasized the man’s audacity to compare himself to Van Gogh. "’My work is windows into another world that no one else sees,’ he proclaims… He sighs. His voice has a drawl to it, a suggestion of ennui, as if he has long come to terms with his sense of superiority and the explanations it requires…Artistic arrogance is the costume Cranston dons to strut through the world... He once wore a peacock outfit in a skating performance and still, at least in spirit if not in dress, he likes to fan out his plumage.” It makes for good reading, to be sure. But the implication that Cranston, the “peacock with the paintbrush” didn’t merit his streak of eccentricity doesn’t fly. His passionate drive as an artist was borne out by his lifelong, obsessive work ethic as an artist, whether on skates or with brush in hand. Perhaps the writer did not understand the concept of camp. A classic archetype of gay personae, camp is an artful and dramatic way of life. Camp is difficult to define: it is performative, yet second nature to those who possess it. It is about art and artifice, yet impossible to fake. It’s a show, but more than that, a way of being. It is both ostentatious and subdued. Intelligence, wit, and irony are hallmarks of camp, yet it inverts and disrupts dominant ideals of beauty and taste. Camp is a form of masquerade, yet it must come naturally in order for one to possess it. In camp, everything is exaggerated, and yet it is sharp and incisive and confident. Camp is about excess emotionalism, and yet it is detached. To be camp, one must possess a cocky superiority complex, but it is also self-deprecating. The word might come from the French, se camper, meaning to pose in an exaggerated way. Camp is Oscar Wilde, Freddie Mercury, Jean Cocteau. Toller Cranston’s grand gestures and maximalist sensibilities on ice and in art, are absolute camp.  The Bride Who Flew Away, by Toller Cranston (Canada) 2007 As an artist, he was also a magician. His paintings are other worldly fairy tales from his fertile imagination, a veritable circus of fantastical costumed queens and creatures, summoned from mythology, dance, folklore, and literature. He was profoundly influenced by both folkloric and Imperial Russia, and the history of Russian ballet, and visited often from his youth. Pravda, the Russian paper, described him as “more Russian than the Russians.” His work was also heavily informed by theatre and dance. His paintings are narratives and performances for operas and ballets that have not yet been written. They are resplendent, too, with ornament and motifs and patterns inspired by palaces, by tiles and embroidery and painting in Uzbekistan, Persia, China, India, Mexico and beyond. They are ostentatious, and decorative, evoking sumptuous fabrics. They are floral, ornamental, all silk and velvet. They are whimsical, mythic, phantasmagorial. Toller sometimes felt like a fish out of water, misunderstood, as he put it, by a country that was too young to “get” his old soul. "Our country is too new,” he told Hampson in 2003. “The DNA is too new. The brains are too new." He was probably right. If his slight seemed snide, it was a response to a real phenomenon. Canadians by and large ignored his art completely, and some dismissed it outright. Harold Town, an abstract painter of fading renown, called Toller a “Sunday painter,” a snub that couldn’t have been more tone-deaf given Toller’s relentless productivity and self-support of an expensive athletic career. Barbara Sears for McLean’s Magazine quotes AGO curator Maria-Mari Sutnik, explaining why the museum does not own any of his paintings. “His work doesn’t fit into any of our collections. His work is decorative art. And then he left the country. He wasn’t part of the community.” This embarrassing exclusion borders on outright bigotry, attesting to the sorry state of academic and popular arts-historical, history, and cultural education in this country. Cranston lived and painted in the modern and postmodern era, and modernism pervaded art, with a critical and popular preference for massive canvases marked by abstract splashes and austere geometrics, and for conceptual work that draws on ugly politics over sumptuous beauty traditions. There is, by design and rebellion, nothing of the old worlds in the new. Beauty and old culture were stripped away from art defiantly as artists sought to separate themselves from everything ancient. Thematically, conceptually, new art has been about austerity, resistance, and oppression, rejecting history, tradition, and any hint of opulence or theatre. Toller said, “My work has always been atypical…of what one might think of Canadian art…” He was a fountain tapped into those ancient worlds, the rivers of old cultures and their ideas of beauty, their patterns, pageantry and puppetry, their lavish courts and harems and storybooks. On his passions and performance in daily life, writing, ice, and paint, Toller stated astutely, “It all derives from the same creative reservoir.” He was also deeply rooted in the 20th century world of theatre and dance, where countless gay artists and actors and costumiers and couturiers thrived. This world of new and ancient spectacle was where he belonged. Everything was camp and flourish and beauty. No wonder he fled to Mexico. Mexico’s pomp and passion and fearless colour were synonymous with his soul. Fashion journalist Jeanne Beker described him thus: "He was style personified in his dramatic hats and capes, with a wardrobe of the finest cashmere sweaters, in exotic shades of persimmon and banana.” Olympic silver medalist Debbi Wilkes trained with Toller in his early years and travelled the globe with him. After his passing in 2015, she spoke to the Canadian Press of his unforgettable personality. “He was crazy, he was absolutely the weirdest and most wonderful person ever. Incredibly generous, but never spoke about that, and loved the drama, loved the spotlight, wanted to be the centre of attention.” “Cranston’s over-the-top self-aggrandizement, combined with the incessant name-dropping, threaten to turn the book into either annoying drivel or hilarious parody. But it never does, and the book remains an oddly compelling read.” The literary review, The Quill and Quire, weighed in on one of his autobiographies, Zero Tollerance. “Although he admits to suffering from a cocaine addiction in the early 1990s, for example, he glosses over the gory details. And, with the exception of one brief, but apparently passionate, affair with a married man in Paris, Cranston refuses to open the kimono on his sex life.” Perhaps. Leaving aside the question of how much of one’s personal life is the rightful business of the public, it was no secret that Toller was gay or that he struggled with cocaine addiction. Like many focused athletes, Toller strived for monastic celibacy when training, unwilling to let desire distract. As for his dalliances, this was also a time when social and cultural homophobia allowed what was obvious so long as it was undeclared. In terms of his addiction, Toller’s chapters on the subject are quite candid. He wrote honestly and insightfully about the personal and social stresses that lead to substance abuse, about crashing under the pressure of his own drive. “Alcohol, drugs, or religion can freeze the pain for a moment. Under their influence, particularly cocaine’s, you reach a point where you don’t give a good goddamn about anything. Then you do it to punish yourself.” He advises the reader not to place the blame for his choices on anyone else, including another skater and colleague of Toller’s who had tragically died of a cocaine overdose at the age of 40. “I crumbled. I went past my limit, and I had neither close friends nor family. I had no one to turn to…Perhaps, at the time, I had created a persona that was too far out, and I had to crash. I had to get real. I had to start playing the game of life like other people in the world, not just live in a fantasy.” He also spoke about falling for the deadly fantasy of turbulence. "The myth was that to be a great artist, you had to lead a tortured life.” Perhaps the takeaway for those of us who have gone down this terrible road and lived to tell the tale is the realization that it is not the road of artists alone. Artists are necessarily sensitive creatures who experience life and feel deeply. But pain and confusion and the search for coping mechanisms with which to handle it gracefully are universally human. It is not only the colourful personality that falls into the undertow of addiction, but rather that their position is one of unique public scrutiny and pressure. He was also engagingly forthright about his infamous inability to manage his money, and the messy impulsivity that drove his spending habits. He lived lavishly but was more often than not totally broke. In true form, he died without a will, leaving his next-of-kin with a shambles of paperwork to sort through his assets. One could get catty instead about Toller’s trademark self-aggrandizement, but perhaps it is better to ignore that eternally boyish bravado and turn that attention to the fact of his work. Toller put everything into his work, with a rigorous, obsessive discipline that was only matched by his voracious creative vision. The athletic endurance and training it reflected, the tireless efforts, the sacrifices he made. His friend and agent Christopher Talbot said on video for the Canadian Press, “His greatest joy was in the studio. But he certainly suffered. Nothing was ever good enough. He was a perfectionist to the point of absolute dysfunction.” At the end of the day, if he compared himself often to Van Gogh and to Da Vinci, what of it? I would go so far as to say that such comparisons are his rightful place, if work, passion, skill, talent, innovation, production, experiment, and study have anything to do with it. Toller’s paintings bring us into a magical kingdom infused with lively storybook spirits and the enchanted realms of ancient cultures. Decorative? Oh, yes. The whole history of multicultural ornamental aesthetics is brought to life on his canvases, teeming with flowers, jewels, and patterns from palaces and folk culture alike, from old Europe to the near and far east, to the pre-Columbian Americas. And watching him skate is an otherworldly experience, too. The videos are all scratchy and dated, but even so, the artist is enigmatic, transporting you into another space. He soars on those slivered silvery blades, spinning until we are dizzy, with exquisite grace and panache. Watching him, we sail away, beyond the beyond. Lorette C. Luzajic  |