When Ori Toor sits down to craft a drawing in his Gibberish series, he typically has in his mind just one image or stray narrative to begin the work. The Tel Aviv-based illustrator, fine artist, and animator says he’s always surprised at what happens next, and it “never turns out like anything I imagine.”
“I’m not even sure I have an imagination anymore,” Toor says. “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 freelance work carries notes of that penchant toward improvisation, whether it’s a stirring, multi-component advertisement for Nike, a Wired magazine illustration, or one of his animation projects. All of it shows an artist reining in—and thriving in—chaos. But the Gibberish series is the most vivid realization of his talents in creating dynamic stories that traverse across the page and offer multiple points of entry and interpretations. Mysterious machines line landscapes, packed with familiar forms and abstractions, as miniature and towering characters emerge nearby. Toor is somehow able to create a sense of cohesion, if not through palettes or intersecting lines, through an assumption from the viewer that all of it is part of a single puzzle—even if it isn’t. The running selection of works was given the formal name of Gibberish in recent years, but he says it’s a “refinement of what I’ve been doing for many years: basically doodling mindlessly.”
