NEWPORT BEACH, CA.- The Orange County Museum of Art on February 15, 2015, will open the first West Coast museum exhibition dedicated to the artist Fred Tomaselli. Born in Southern California and a graduate of California State University, Fullerton, Tomaselli now lives and works in New York, where he has built a reputation for his vibrant and intricate painting technique. Fred Tomaselli: The Times highlights a recent and extensive body of work adapting cover photos of The New York Times daily papers, echoing the absurdity of endless news cycles, and occasionally commenting on the stories' contents. In addition, OCMA is presenting a selection of his collage and resin paintings; many are large scale and all capture the extreme attention to detail for which the artist is renowned. Fred Tomaselli: The Times is on view February 15 through May 24, 2015.
According to OCMA Chief Curator Dan Cameron, "As a native son of Orange County, Fred Tomaselli brings qualities of invention and humor to his art that I think our public is particularly well equipped to appreciate."
The Paintings
In 1985, after graduating from California State University and working within the installation and conceptual art movements that were dominate in California at the time, Tomaselli moved from Los Angeles to New York "for a change of scenery." There, he enjoyed far greater access to a variety art, specifically, the image-driven works that fueled the figurative revival then underway in his adopted city. As a result, his art now embodies figures, birds, fish, flowers and other visions from the passions of his younger self.
Drawing upon art historical sources and Eastern and Western decorative traditions, Tomaselli's paintings seem to explode in mesmerizing patterns that grow organically across his compositions. Inspired by the likes of artists from Masaccio (1401–1438) to Joan Miro (1893–1983), his works have been compared to tapestries, quilts, or mosaics. Their various components—pharmaceuticals, street drugs, organic matter, collaged elements from printed sources, and hand-painted ornament—are suspended in gleaming layers of clear, polished, hard resin. Assemblage- or collage-like, Tomaselli's paintings offer an amalgamation of his influences in California and New York.
The resin paintings, of which seven will be included in the exhibition, helped the artist establish an international reputation for his meticulously detailed, beautiful, and mesmerizing works that bridge abstract and figurative art.
The Times series
Beginning in 2005, Tomaselli developed a new body of works on paper that transform the front page of The New York Times with gouache and collage. The focus of this exhibition of approximately 100 works, Tomaselli's surreal compositions are ruminations on the absurdity of news cycles and provide him a space to respond to a variety of issues—from regional anecdotes to global crises.
A newspaper’s front page records in the present tense what will eventually become history. It orients the public's attention to pressing actions—be they individual, political, or natural. Tomaselli‘s new works reflect and reinvent the news through complexly layered collages superimposed onto recent cover illustrations in The New York Times. These collage-paintings present 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 creations. His interventions play against the detachment of journalistic forms, inserting emotion, fantasy, and irrationality to counterpoint or underscore the original narrative, while amplifying the specificity of the image.
Of the devastating 2005 flooding in New Orleans, for example, the artist stated, "I found in this waterline of the drowned city of New Orleans—this terrible event—what I thought was an uncannily beautiful geometric-based abstraction; I used the flooded streets to guide me in making that."
The Times grew from Tomaselli’s own doodlings of personal commentary while reading, eventually spurring him to marry his “news junkie” habit with his studio practice. The series runs the gamut from hard-edged abstraction to hallucinatory pattern play, and engages in a free-wheeling, visual dialogue with art historical imagery and themes, refracted through present-day news images. Incorporating collage elements along with gouache—using super-detail oriented, tiny, fine-point brushes—the artist creates intricate and detailed imagery that's often beyond easy translation or comprehension.
This body of work however, has not been Tomaselli's main focus over the last decade, a period that has proven productive in many ways. He talks about the Times pieces as brief, improvisational excursions from other more ambitious, and often months-long engagements. "Each morning," he concludes, "I wake up, plod out to the kitchen, grab my cup of coffee, spread open the paper, and tend to the garden of my times."
