ART CITIES:London- Fred Tomaselli
Over his career, Fred Tomaselli is best known for his highly detailed paintings on wood panels, combining an array of unorthodox materials suspended in a thick layer of clear, epoxy resin, in his work the artists is exploring the nature of perception in wild paintings and collages that include everything from pictures to pills. Colorful and imaginative, Tomaselli’s works are like portals to an alternate universe.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: white Cube Gallery Archive
Fred Tomaselli presents his solo exhibition “Paper” at the white Cube Gallery in London. As the title suggests, the exhibition focuses on works on paper and includes photograms, collages and interventions onto the front page of The New York Times. Even in our digital age of constant information, the cycle of the daily newspaper is still a central form of organizing the world around us. The newspaper’s front page records in the present tense what will eventually become history. It orients our attention to pressing actions, be they individual, political, or natural, that over time repeat and rearrange into patterns around common human motivations. Fred Tomaselli‘s “The Times” series traffics in these patterns, reflecting and reinventing them through complexly layered collages superimposed on recent cover stories in The New York Times. The collages surface unseen connections, rearrange realities, and reveal relationships of images and ideas across time and space. Tomaselli uses images within the familiar grid of the front page as portals, overwriting and manipulating the supposed objective reality of the newspaper with his completely subjective surreality. As the artist says “With the “Times” series, I can work fast. I can work out my anger over the news. I can talk back to it in my own way. I don’t think it’s effecting any meaningful political change. What I like is that they keep me off balance because each picture has to be dealt with in the particularities-the surrounding context and bylines. So that pushes me in directions I might not have gone. It’s good to keep off balance or else you can go into a comfort zone. That’s the death of an artist”. Tomaselli’s photograms and chemical portraits employ another dying, analogue media, that of chemical based photography. First produced in the ‘90s, Tomaselli’s chemical portraits attempt to get “Into the inner and outer space of the sitter”, the process begins with the sitter answering a list of questions such as their date of birth and drug history. With this information Tomaselli creates images of constellations using the photogram process, depicting his sitter’s astrological sign and characteristics, reflecting the idea that in many cultures the exact time of birth determines the course of a person’s life. The artist adds, as collaged elements, any drugs that the sitter has used in order to suggest the modified reality that makes-up every individual experience. Exhibited with one image for each month of the year, the group of portraits alludes to a community of friends, while chronicling the passing of time. Other photograms in the exhibition incorporate leaves grown in the artist’s own garden, harvested and then preserved.
Info: White Cube Gallery, 25–26 Mason’s Yard, London, Duration 17/3-13/5/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, http://whitecube.com
