Tabo Toral, 1990’s Graffiti Artist. Mixed Media Painting Bold Colorful New Wave NYC Panama, c.1990’s

Blind Heads, mixed media painting
Tabo Toral, Panamanian (1950 – ) Born Boquete, Chiriquí. Panamanian painter.
Studied plastic arts in the United States between 1969-1970 at The Maryland College of Art in Baltimore and in Canada between 1971-72 at The Nova Scotia College of Art. He finally moved to Ciudad de Panama where, between 1973-1976, he studied journalism at the University of Panama.
With a unique style dominated by the vividness of color, the compositional quality and a complex texture that arises from the excess of pictorial matter, Toral has had individual exhibitions in places like New York, Switzerland, Canada, Panama, Bogota, etc. Likewise, he has participated in international collective exhibitions such as Contemporary Panama; Panamanian art Today II; Mesoamerican Presence; and in Biennials as the 1st Biennial of Painting of the Central American Isthmus; Biennial of Graphic Arts of the Caribbean and the Biennale of Venezia.
His works are part of permanent collections of museums and institutions such as the MAC of Panama, the Library of the City of New York, Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá, World Bank of Washington, Museum of Contemporary Art of León, Nicaragua, etc. His work bears a similarity to the 1980’s work of the Memphis Milano group. Ettore Sottsass, Peter Shire, and the Downtown NYC artists Mark Kostabi, and Kenny Scharf. Tabo Toral, lived through the events of January 9, 1964 and the historical division of the country through the Pre-treated Canal, intuitively celebrated the ten years of the creation of the Panama Canal Authority by painting his first works of the extensive series that he would title It’s not a ship in the Canal.
These boats, whose initial silhouette I confused with sketches of pre-Columbian arrows sketched in a carmine hue, were transformed, through their unique style, based on mathematical formulas, into images recognizable as ships. These present a prow created by an inverted triangle and a bridge constructed with a horizontal rectangle, divided into four triangular shapes. The figure of the boat thus constituted is anchored in parallel pigment bands that represent the sea initially and the waters of the locks in later versions.
Tabo Toral studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore in 1969 and at the Nova Scotia College of Art in Halifax from 1969 to 1971 before completing his education from 1971 to 1976 at the Escuela de Comunicación Social of the Universidad de Panamá.
His first works were delicate and anecdotal drawings and etchings of mysterious, fairy-tale characters in fanciful surroundings. From the late 1970s he produced brightly colored abstract paintings with gridlike substructures based on esoteric geometric relationships and inspired by Eastern philosophies; they were usually titled after the date on which they were finished.
Toral moved to the USA in the early 1980s, where he changed to a figurative, neo-expressionist style and produced murals of semi-mechanical figures influenced by graffiti art. After returning to Panama in 1994, Toral explored new territory by combining the abstract geometric style of his earlier works with figurative elements, often human figures such as aborigines or bound women.