Fred Tomaselli

NEW YORK—Fred Tomaselli (b. 1956) is celebrated for the ecstatic fantasies he presents in his pictures—explosions of color, laced with art-historical references, that both invite transcendence and hint at the more toxic, monstrous visions that can accompany quests for the sublime.

He uses a range of techniques, including collage, painting and glazing, to make his highly decorative pictures that are often described as psychedelic—particularly since he has infamously included pills and marijuana leaves among his collage materials (which once led to his works being detained by customs officials in France).

Indeed, Tomaselli—who has said his involvement with “stoner” culture in his youth has been an important influence on his art—creates works that act very much like a drug, but one that alters a viewer’s consciousness via the eyes rather than chemistry.

Today, the outdoor-loving Tomaselli, who says he hasn’t used LSD in over 25 years, incorporates pressed leaves from his Brooklyn garden in his works, in addition to his signature elements—images of flora, fauna and human body parts cut out of magazines, field guides and catalogues (in addition to actual insects and flowers).

His newest show of paintings is at the James Cohan Gallery in New York until Nov. 11. Though his work has evolved a long way since his debut in the early 1980s, when he was an installation artist and part of the southern Californian punk-rock and performance-art scene, he explains how many of those same, early-career concerns still inform his art.

Tomaselli spoke to ArtInfo in his Brooklyn studio in the days before the show opened—and while he was still putting the finishing touches on some of the pictures.

----------------------

Fred, let’s begin by talking about how you make these beautifully crafted pictures. I’m fascinated by the tiny elements cut out from magazine illustrations. Are they your starting point?

Yes. Here [in Lark (2006)] I’m working with white flowers, for example. I have a studio assistant who cuts them out for me, so I can put them down where I want them, and then I glue them. I have drawers full of them. It’s my little cabinet of wonders. There are orange, blue and white flowers … then animal, vegetable, mineral … there are body parts: hands, mouths … This is pretty much the DNA of my work.

Do you know precisely how the picture’s going to turn out when you begin?

No. Increasingly the work is involved with intuition and micro-decision making. I sometimes don’t know at all how these things are going to evolve over time. I try to be open to intuition and the “expressive moment,” if you will.

So you seal these collaged elements in resin after gluing them down?

Yes, basically I glue these things down, then I go over them with different varnishes. I lay the picture down on the ground, pour resin, leave it overnight, sand it, and then I get it back up on the wall. But mostly I work on the floor.

How many coats of resin are there?

Enough to cover whatever it is that I’m trying to encapsulate. Migrant Fruit Thugs (2006), for example, is one of the thinner works. It only has flat leaves on it, so it only has four or five coats of resin. I paint between the layers of resin, and I like that, because I like the slight three dimensionality that comes into the work—and having slightly different focal points and the shadow play. It makes the viewer a little off-balance as to the nature of the reality of the things that they’re seeing.

Yes, not being quite sure what you’re looking at seems a fundamental aspect of these paintings.

I want people to get lost in the work. I want to seduce people into it and I want people to escape inside the world of the work. In that way the work is pre-Modernist. I throw all of my obsessions and loves into the work, and I try not to be too embarrassed about any of it. I love nature, I love gardening, I love watching birds, and all of that gets into the work. I just try to be true to who I am and make the work I want to see. I don’t have a radical agenda.

Don’t you? For a lot of people your work is associated with psychedelia and hallucinogenic drugs.