Transportive Visions - New York-based painter Fred Tomaselli

Art in America, July, 1999 by Gregory Volk

New York-based painter Fred Tomaselli has won a reputation for optically dazzling canvases that employ not only paint but also arrays of mind-bending flora and pharmaceuticals. His latest works explore the contradictory turns that have marked the American quest for a natural utopia.

This is an eventful time for Fred Tomaselli, whose recent paintings push his already complex esthetic in fresh directions. Tomaselli is known for exquisitely crafted works that combine pigment with highly unorthodox materials--most notoriously, drugs of various kinds. In the past he has made landscapes with trees fashioned from pasted-down marijuana leaves, a stellar sky "blazing" with hundreds of tablets, intricately patterned designs that employ hundreds of multicolored pills laid into wood panels, and minimalist paintings consisting of columns of pills sealed beneath layers of transparent, highly polished resin. Although drugs still appear in some of his recent works, it's often in a more discreet manner, with other eclectic materials--parts of plants, real insects, mass-media cutouts--now supplying the visual dazzle.

Tomaselli first emerged as an artist from the underground punk-rock scene in Los Angeles in the late 1970s and early '80s. That subcultural milieu, which had more than its share of substance abuse, provides one mason for the drugs that you find in his work. What's more important is the way that drugs--with their mind-altering and body-changing capabilities, with their promise of an alternative consciousness that has both an ecstatic and a dark side--have become a complex reference point through which Tomaselli explores his main themes: utopianism and its failure, and the contest of nature and technology. Of course, the drugs that he employs in his art no longer reach the brain through the mouth and the bloodstream but through the eyes, as elements of brilliant color and design; it is the paintings themselves that hold out the possibility of being consciousness-changing vehicles. With his newest works, other, nonpsychoactive materials function in much the same way. Intensely decorative as visual objects (Tomaselli refers to them offhandedly as "eye candy"), these paintings are also imbued with potentially transcendent capabilities.

Bird Blast (1997), for example, presents images of hundreds of birds which were snipped out of various field guides, meticulously attached to a panel and then covered by rosin. Filling the whole picture field (except for the thin black painted bands around the borders of the painting), they seem to hurtle outward from a point in the center as if propelled by a cosmic explosion. Interspersed among the birds are various white pills which suggest distant stars. One of the odder aspects of this work is that the birds' eyes are actually those of humans--specifically, they are fashion models' eyes cut from glossy magazines. There's something eerie about blue-eyed birds, or birds with eyelashes, or hundreds of birds coolly and thoughtfully gazing as they're whirled outward by what seems an overwhelming centrifugal force. Them is also something jarring about seeing so many species mixed together pell-mell, in a way that seems hallucinatory and bizarre, if not downright perverse. But what really gets to you is the maximal, go-for-broke beauty of this reeling dislocation of nature, with its pulsating, packed-in colors and intricate textures.

There's a liberating, mind-spinning power to such a work, which befits an artist who has long been interested in psychedelia in its various guises--from rock album covers, concert posters and LSD visions to Navajo rug designs, Indian Tantric paintings and Islamic architectural patterning. Many of Tomaselli's works are marked by vivid ornament pushed to the extreme, to the point that it assumes archetypal resonance. With Echolocation (1998), what look like oblong strands of jewels actually consist of acrylic paint, photocollaged pictures of insects and birds, and hundreds of parti-colored pills. Seemingly floating over a dark background, these forms conjure oscillating sound waves, the structures of galaxies or atoms, and also, perhaps, religious or meditative designs.

Eyebrid (1997), a crazy-quilt array of small colorful objects, once again veers between rigorous order and hallucinatory tumult. In it are real and painted flowers; tiny marijuana leaves abound, along with curlicue stems running from the top to bottom of the work. And sprouting from stalks are numerous eyes, either painted in a md-veined manner or cut from magazines. A willfully decorative work that has strange paradisial connotations, Eyebrid is a kind of Edenic garden filled with all-seeing eyes.

Eyebrid is one of many instances when Tomaselli, with his souped-up renditions of nature, reveals affinities with the 19th-century nature-centered painting of the Hudson River school or the Luminists. You could also make a case for his connection to Ralph Waldo Emerson and American Transcendentalism, with its focus on personal spiritual catharsis triggered by immersion in nature. While Tomaselli is no latter-day romantic, his work is filled with indications of a spiritualized nature, intimations of vastness (whether psychic or worldly) and an understanding that sheer beauty can have dramatically liberating aspects. In his case, the visionary quality is filtered through contemporary references to pop consumerism, drug culture and rock music-inspired psychedelia, among other things, but it's palpably there and highly compelling.