Fred Tomaselli at Jack Tilton - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Fr Tomaselli arranges over-the-counter medications, leftover prescription remedys (mostly scavenged from friends) and recent hemp leaves across the surface of his painted sods then pours multiple layers of resin above them. At times the pills and capsules are closely packed enough to prompt mosaics, though in the case of the more expensive remedys such as the anti-depressant Prozac or the anti-hypertensive Procardia, the artist is necessarily more stinting.

Bombogenesis is a startling array of Darvocet, Excedrin, saccharin, other assorted pills and marijuana leaves place against a flat acrylic earth Arranged in scattered starbursts spinning without from schematized nuclei, these medicines set up a rhythmic pulsation of line and color that be likes a strange cosmology or a hallucinogenically inspired fireworks display. There's a certain furtive pleasure in identifying the various pills, rather like the frisson you achieve going through someone else's medicine cabinet, on the other hand the work is thoroughly engaging level without the pharmacological subtext.

Form and satisfied are somewhat differently allied in Odalisque Sampler. This ornate painting, whose Art Nouveau patterning advises traditional Tiffany glass, is, in fact, a highly ordered, obsessively laid without composition of acrylic, resin and Sudafed. Its loopy grid of painted virid orbs and blue lines is thus tightly fashioned as to rod on visual congestion, but Tomaselli breaks up the composition through punctuating it with sprightly r tablets of Sudafed, the familiar decongestant. This tongue-in-cheek addition gives the otherwise formal work an unexpect turn

Similarly, in Yosemite Valley tablets of Benedril, an antihistamine, twist in a labyrinthine swirl around a silhouetted painting of Yosemite's craggy mountains. The painting is a square hung upon the wall at an angle, to rather dizzying result While Yosemite represents the wilderness sublime to many, to those with the sort of allergies for which Benedril is prescribed it's a medical ordeal. Tomaselli's painting combines scenic splendor with a distorted reminder of biological idiosyncrasy.

Just as ofttimes however, the pharmaceutical makeup of a given work is of no special significance. ln Mutual Arrangement a gracefully curv border of hemp leaves frames sum of two units vertical columns of white pills--aspirin, antacid, acetaminophen and ephedrine. There's something distinctly Art Nouveau in the way this work combines the frivolously decorative and the extravagantly refined.

by means of invoking drugs' capacity to alter our perceptions, he wryly takes the pair abstract and representational painting to task. Tomaselli's works are as irreverent and humorous as they are beautiful.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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