M HKA Ensembles

Photography, framed silver gelatin print, mounted on aluminium, 82.5 x 123 cm.

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. BK7613_M384).

A man is seen in three-quarters profile sitting on a chair, his back to the camera. He is holding a glass of champagne in his left hand. Instead of bringing it to his lips, he raises it away from his body in mid air, where it stands out sharply against a rectangle of light cast diagonally on the rear wall by the slide carousel in the left foreground. The photograph bears a title: Toast. This then is what the man in the photograph is doing. But whom or what is he toasting? A word is written on the white surface whose shape and size immediately bring to mind those of a screen: “Truth.” If I had to choose a single picture in Ana Torfs body of work that most accurately conveys its unswerving course, it would probably be this one. It’s all there: the picture, the word, the title, the film screen, and the search for truth, but with no naivety and nearly without hope, for the man is seen from behind and truth is a word projected onto a wall – might as well say a pipe dream. (...) All the questioning, the calling and the searching revolve aimlessly around an absent and meaningless core: truth is but a word projected onto a wall, an illusion traced by finger on the fogged-up surface of a mirror, which a single breath can erase. - Jean Torrent in Correspondences, A Prior Magazine 10, 2004