Fred Tomaselli - Brief Article

Interview, Jan-April, 2001 by Neville Wakefield

HE BRINGS IDEAS TO LIFE

"If I'd known twenty five years ago what I was going to be doing now, I'd have probably said 'shoot me.'" Such is the verdict of Fred Tomaselli, a self-described "accidental painter," whose recent work appears to be the more likely product of a Deadhead throwback than a veteran of the LA punk scene. Certainly, Tomaselli's paintings have the zoned-out look of hippie art. [Several examples are on display in Fred Tomaselli, New Paintings & Drawings, at New York's James Cohan Gallery, through January 13.] Composed of hundreds of individual elements, each meticulously embalmed in clear resin, the multitudes of petals, leaves, insects and butterflies are cultivated into Edenic gardens of earthly delight. But there is nothing innocent in the mind-bending flora and pharmaceuticals that weave in and out of the patterns, lacing their psychedelic dazzle with threats of the real thing. Beauty, they seem to say, has a toxic edge, and transcendence is never more than the pop of a pill away.

Tomaselli attributes his interest in the unfulfilled promises of the drug culture to the fact that he came of age "just at the moment when '60s idealism had devolved into disco and cocaine." Like an archaeologist, he sifts through ruins, reconstructing in his paintings images of failed utopias and their quest for the modern sublime. In one recent work, a series of small cut-out photographs were arranged in a zodiac-like cosmology of small dwellings. Amongst them were Thoreau's famous cabin at Walden Pond, a hippie commune, Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski's Montana shack, and other temples to the heaven-on-earth aspirations of the American dream. In his hands the visionaries have been re-visioned, and better living through chemistry--as much as ideology--is just another motif in an ever more artificial world.

Neville Wakefield is a frequent Interview contributor. Above: Fred Tomaselli's Untitled (2000), measuring 7 x 10', a resin-on-wood panel containing botanical material, insects, pills, and acrylic. Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery.