Transportive Visions - New York-based painter Fred Tomaselli

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

This is an critical time for Fred Tomaselli, whose new paintings push his already mixed esthetic in fresh directions. Tomaselli is known for exquisitely crafted works that combine pigment with highly unorthodox materials--most notoriously, remedys of various kinds. In the past he has made landscapes with tree fashioned from pasted-down marijuana leaves, a stellar firmament "blazing" with hundreds of tablets, intricately patterned designs that exercise hundreds of multicolored pills laid into thicket panels, and minimalist paintings consisting of rounded pillars of pills sealed beneath layers of transparent, highly polished resin. Although physics still appear in some of his new 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 emerg as an artist from the subterranean punk-rock scene in Los Angeles in the late 1970 and early '80 That subcultural milieu, which had more than its share of substance abuse, provides single 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 one as well as the other an ecstatic and a dark side--have become a mixed reference point through which Tomaselli explores his main themes: utopianism and its failure, and the litigate of nature and technology. Of course, the physics that he employs in his art no longer reach the brain end the mouth and the bloodstream on the contrary through the eyes, as uncompounded bodys of brilliant color and design; it is the paintings themselves that grasp out the possibility of being consciousness-changing vehicles. With his newest works, other, nonpsychoactive materials function in abundant the same way. Intensely decorative as visual thing perceiveds (Tomaselli refers to them offhandedly as "eye candy"), these paintings are also imbued with potentially transcendent capabilities.

Bird Blast (1997) for example, not aways images of hundreds of birds which were snipped without of various field guides, meticulously attached to a panel and then overspreaded by rosin. Filling the whole picture field (except for the thin black painted bands around the borders of the painting), they look to hurtle outward from a point in the center as if propell through a cosmic explosion. Interspersed among the birds are various white pills which give an inkling of distant stars. One of the odder aspects of this work is that the birds' organ of visions are actually those of humans--specifically, they are fashion models' organ of sights cut from glossy magazines. There's something eerie about blue-ey birds, or birds with eyelashes, or centurys of birds coolly and thoughtfully gazing as they're whirled outward by the agency of what seems an overwhelming centrifugal force. Them is also something jarring about seeing with equal reason many species mixed together confusedly in a way that appears hallucinatory and bizarre, if not downright perverted 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 of the like kind a work, which befits an artist who has drawn out been interested in psychedelia in its various guises--from stone 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 through vivid ornament pushed to the most distant to the point that it assumes archetypal resonance. With Echolocation (1998) what gaze like oblong strands of jewels actually consist of acrylic paint, photocollaged pictures of insects and birds, and centurys of parti-colored pills. Seemingly floating above a dark background, these forms beg oscillating sound waves, the manner of makings of galaxies or atoms, and also, perhaps, religious or meditative designs.

Eyebrid (1997) a crazy-quilt array of small colorful percepts once again veers between rigorous order and hallucinatory outbreak In it are real and painted flowers; tiny marijuana leaves abound, along with curlicue main stocks running from the top to bottom of the work. And sprouting from stalks are numerous organ of sights either painted in a md-veined manner or wound 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 individual 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 seminary or the Luminists. You could also make a case for his connection to Ralph Waldo Emerson and American Transcendentalism, with its focus upon personal spiritual catharsis triggered through 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 end contemporary references to pop consumerism, medicine culture and rock music-inspired psychedelia, among other things, on the other hand it's palpably there and highly compelling.