Although the truism often got lost in the postmodernist, high-concept faddishness of the late 20th century, art should be first and foremost about the eye.
Few contemporary artists offer a bigger blast of visuality in their work than Brooklyn painter Fred Tomaselli, with his effusive colors, ornate patterns and turbocharged compositions.
“Maybe it’s akin to a pop song,” he said. “If you like the melody and the beat, maybe eventually you’ll listen to the lyrics. But you don’t listen to the lyrics initially — you have to love the song. That’s form, and I put that front and center.”
The fascinating, free-thinking artist is being celebrated in a touring midcareer retrospective that is touted as the most comprehensive examination to date of his already considerable accomplishments.
It will be on view through Oct. 11 at the Aspen Art Museum, which co-organized the show along with the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
After a stop early next year at the Tang, it will be shown at the Brooklyn Museum from Oct. 8, 2010, through Jan. 2, 2011, and is expected to travel to at least one additional venue, as well.
With 40 paintings and works on paper spanning nearly 20 years, the exhibition is a commendably ambitious undertaking for Aspen’s small but spunky museum, which continues to build a national and international profile.
While there is probably no one work that sums up Tomaselli’s wide- ranging approach, “Untitled (Explusion)” (2000), a dazzling 7-by-10-foot painting on wood panel, contains many themes and visual devices that define his approach.
Most of this explosive composition is dominated by a collaged starburst of radiating leaves, pills and cut-out photos of butterflies, hands and flowers from field guides, gardening catalogs, and magazines — all set against a black background and encased under a thick layer of clear resin.
Painted, cartoonish plants run across the bottom, and, in the right corner, are diminutive depictions of Adam and Eve based on Masaccio’s “Expulsion From the Garden of Eden” (1426-27) but rendered like scientific drawings, with their blood vessels visible.
As utterly contemporary as it is, this work — like all of Tomaselli’s paintings — resonates directly and indirectly with that of the old masters.
Clearly, he has been influenced by the strange worlds of Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch, and he makes direct references to artists such as Masaccio and Italian 16th- century mannerist Giuseppe Arcimboldo, best known for his constructed, collagelike portraits.
Archimboldo’s influence is especially evident in “Field Guides” (2003), in which Tomaselli carefully arranged collaged pictures of body parts from books to assemble his image of the figure — a stylized, oddly festive take on the grim reaper.
Other worlds
Although their techniques inevitably differ, Tomaselli shares with the old masters a meticulous, painstaking attention to detail and an interest in creating windows to other worlds — real or imagined.
Pursuing the classic notion of a painting as an illusionary evocation of some alternate reality arose out of his 1980s installations that delved into the dual natures of theme parks, a familiar part of his native Southern California.
And, of course, reaching for an altered state has much to do with the psychedelic-drug culture, which has also marked Tomaselli and his work.
From these explorations have emerged the principal themes in his art, starting with notions of failed utopias, as evidenced by Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden.
Besides failed social experiments, Tomaselli also contemplates the dissolution of utopian art movements, such as futurism, as well as the ecstasy and destruction that can both be part of drugs’ promised pleasure states.
“I’m not trying to tell you who to vote for or the cause to be against or for,” the artist said during a two- week stay in Aspen to help install the show and accept the Aspen Award for Art. “I’m just trying to find these corollaries between my own social history and art history.”
Those lines of thinking have naturally led to a further theme of nature versus technology, which is adroitly conveyed in “Self-Annihilation Event in Hybrid Garden” (1997). In it, actual insects are arrayed next to imaginary ones, some shaped with pills.
The real and fanciful constantly intersect in Tomaselli’s works, with the artist further challenging perceptions by embedding objects in his works at different levels and sometimes unexpectedly painting on top of the resin.
“It’s really important to me to keep the viewer a little off balance as to the nature of the reality of the materials,” he said.
Tomaselli first started using pharmaceuticals in his art in 1989, intrigued by both their physical form and metaphorical meanings.
“Instead of going through the bloodstream to affect consciousness, they travel through the eyeballs,” he said of their use in paintings.
Psychoactive flora
The next step was the inclusion of marijuana leaves and other “psychoactive plant materials.” An eye-grabbing example is “Super Plant” (1994), in which roots, leaves, stems and seeds from six such flora have been combined to assemble a perfectly proportioned, fantastical plant.
Much of this painting’s allure derives from Tomaselli’s subversive marriage of the elegantly patterned composition’s exquisite beauty with the underlying implications of these plants and their mind-altering power for good or ill.
Works of this kind led a New York Times critic to refer in 2006 to Tomaselli as “contemporary art’s most technically gifted purveyor of psychedelia.” Such a description is true to a point, but it can also be misleading, because the artist never tries to evoke a drug experience, and many of his pieces, especially his latest ones, set aside or transcend any ties to drug culture.
Anyone who expects Tomaselli to fulfull a hippie or other stereotype of someone once immersed in California’s drug sub-culture will be surprised upon meeting him. The bespectacled, 53-year-old father of an 11-year- old could hardly be more ordinary in appearance, wearing jeans and tennis shoes while at work in Aspen.
“I’m not really interested in advertising my radicality,” he said. “My brain is what it is, and I’ve seen some things. But I just sort feel like I can get through life a lot better by being neutral in my life and putting whatever radicality in my work. I don’t have anything to prove at my age.
“A lot of my friends died pursuing this ridiculous idea of the tragic, romantic figure. I got into some dangerous places myself, and that’s not something that I particularly romanticize. For me, the most important thing is getting up in the morning and making sure my family is OK and that I can make art. And I’m happy and thankful for that.”
Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com
fred tomaselli.
Art. Aspen Art Museum, 590 N. Mill St. This mid- career retrospective offers one of the most comprehensive looks ever at this free-thinking New York artist. The Aspen museum co-organized the show, which is set to tour to at least two other venues, including the Brooklyn Museum. Through Oct. 11. 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays (extended to 7 p.m. on Thursays) and noon to 6 p.m. Sundays. Free. 970-925-8050 or
