Exhibit of the week: Fred Tomaselli

Aspen Art Museum

Aspen, Colo.

Through Oct. 11

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In Fred Tomaselli’s funky, psychedelic paintings, the most important ingredient usually isn’t paint, said Mary Barone in Interview. Built up in mosaic-like fashion, a Tomaselli usually uses pigments and resin as a sticky base upon which to pile “weeds, plants, pills, speed, insects, flowers,” and collaged cutouts of animal and anatomical illustrations. “Tomaselli’s paintings explode in mesmerizing patterns that appear to grow organically across his compositions in a multilayered coexistence of the real, the photographic, and the painterly.” His works from the past 20 years, many of which are on display in a retrospective at the Aspen Art Museum, often resemble nothing so much as drug-induced visions.

It may not be surprising, then, to learn that Tomaselli has an abiding interest in drugs—both legal and illegal—and their effect on the human mind, said Paul Laster in TheDailybeast.com. In 1993’s Black and White All Over, Tomaselli “turns a pharmacy into an art supply store,” embedding rows of painkillers, antacid tablets, and other pills into a field of black paint. Super Plant, from 1994, incorporates real marijuana leaves into its rendering of a beautifully flowering fantasy plant. “For his dynamic 2000 painting Echo, Wow and Flutter, Tomaselli added cutout hands, eyes, flowers, insects, and birds to the leaf and pill mix, while transforming the materials into a gorgeous pop abstraction.” Yet Tomaselli’s often haunting artworks don’t shy from the dark side of drugs.

Indeed, look closely at the imagery in some works and you’ll notice a tone of melancholy at “the ultimately failed promises of the ’60s counterculture,” said Stewart Oksenhorn in the Aspen Times Weekly. Other paintings look back in anger at “the absurdity of the war on drugs,” or point out the artificiality of everyday life in America. In other words, there’s a lot of intellectual rigor behind Tomaselli’s seemingly straightforward head trips. Yet unlike most of today’s conceptual art, which hardly can be comprehended without a set of written footnotes, “Tomaselli’s work is a feast intended for the eyes.” And though in recent works Tomaselli seems to have left the drug culture behind, he hasn’t lost his fondness for “the experience that hallucinogenic drugs could provide.” He merely suggests that, these days, it’s art—not pills—that best provides the visionary “gateways that open to bigger worlds.”