More than meets the eye: Fred Tomaselli’s Second Nature on display at LAM
By MARRIE STONE
Photos by Jeff Rovner
Stand in the center of Fred Tomaselli’s Second Nature exhibition, and you might feel like you’re standing in the eye of a beautiful storm swirling with color, alive with wildlife, beating with heart. For two-dimensional work, Tomaselli creates enormous movement and energy. His collages are amalgams of vibrant imagery and macabre motifs. There are bright colored birds and dancing butterflies, golden leaves and fanciful flowers.
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“Irwin’s Garden” (2013,) acrylic, photo collage, leaves and resin on wood panel. Zoom into each image to note the subtle details.
But look closer and you’ll see his work isn’t entirely innocent. It’s often embedded with pharmaceutical and recreational drugs – LSD and acid tabs, nicotine patches and aspirin, aspartame and saccharine. Tomaselli also incorporates images of severed body parts and cadavers, homages to slavery and the slaughtering of Native Americans, the COVID crisis, global warming and even references to Charles Manson and the Branch Davidian Compound. His New York Times series blends disturbing headlines – “Ex-Chief of WorldCom Is Found Guilty in $11 Billion Fraud” or “Doctors Sound Alarm as a Nation Struggles” – with bright colored bubbles and starry explosions. But the overarching experience feels joyous instead of gruesome. Tomaselli delivers tough messages embedded in whimsy.
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“Saturday, January 17, 2015” (2016,) acrylic and ink on paper
“No matter how beautiful things are, there’s always this other thing happening somewhere else,” Tomaselli said at a talk he delivered at LAM last weekend to open his exhibition. “I want to incorporate that because, while I’m interested in beauty, I’m also interested in truth.”
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Fred Tomaselli appeared at the Laguna Art Museum last weekend to deliver a talk. He appears here alongside “Cloud” (2019), which includes photographs and leaves with his acrylic paint beneath resin.
The how behind Tomaselli’s process is almost as interesting as the why. Almost. We’ll get to that. But like any artist who’s lived nearly seven decades, his creative mind bursts with competing influences, beginning in those earliest days growing up beneath Tinker Bell’s bright light and the magical glow of Disneyland’s nightly fireworks show.
Born in 1956, Tomaselli was raised in Santa Ana, getting his art degree from Cal State Fullerton in 1982 before moving to New York in 1985 where he still lives today. Those were heady, psychedelic days and Tomaselli was no stranger to recreational experimentation. It’s easy to see those hallucinogenic dreams still streaming into his work.
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“Honeycreeper” (2022), acrylic, photo collage, leaves and resin on wood panel
“I grew up thinking nightly fireworks were normal,” Tomaselli said. “I had to move to New York to discover that’s not the life other people experience. Being a stoner in Orange County in the 1970s – which is like being a hippie without any ideology – bled into my consciousness. A lot of my work comes from that position.”
But New York introduced Tomaselli to a darker side of the drug culture. By the late ‘80s, the city was plagued by a crack and crime epidemic. Tomaselli was the victim of a violent mugging, resulting in a hospitalization. “I was thinking about how drugs can change from agents of enlightenment, pleasure and fun to vehicles of destruction, but also vehicles of survival,” he said.
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Fred Tomaselli delivered a talk at LAM last weekend, describing his inspirations, intentions and process
In college, Tomaselli was taught the worst thing artists can do is use their paintings as instruments of escapism and avoid confronting hard truths. “I wanted to make work that was, very self-consciously, about the mechanics of escapism and use my paintings as vehicles to take the viewer to other dimensions (much like looking at a Vermeer can transport us back in time),” he said.
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“After June 2, 2017” (2018), acrylic, photo collage, leaves and resin on wood panel
Close inspection of Tomaselli’s collaged layers reveals his work does just that. Its friendly flowers and psychedelic swirls lure us to look closer, where we’re confronted with uncomfortable truths like political corruption and climate change.
“For me, landscape is really loaded with socio-political boundaries, water rights issues, genocide of Native Americans, slavery and utopian ideology. I want to transport you to that landscape but allow you to see it through a scrim of arabesque imagery,” Tomaselli said of a 1995 piece entitled Double Landscape, created out of saccharin, acrylic and resin.
Tomaselli’s background in the Southern California surf culture – and surf boards – ignited his interest in using resin as a component of his collages. Frustrated by the experience of bugs landing on his unfinished work, he once left a large wet resin panel outside (illuminated with a bright light) to intentionally collect insects. The piece became a kind of diary, freezing wildlife in time. It also highlighted the collision of nature and technology.
Tomaselli collects artifacts from the natural and manmade world – leaves and flower petals, newspaper clippings and other ephemera – filling stacks of drawers he maintains in his studio for ready inspiration. Most of his work incorporates real objects alongside photographs that overlap with his own paintings.
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“Untitled” (2020), acrylic, photo collage, leaves and resin on wood panel
“This relationship between what is real, what is depicted photographically and what is painted becomes hard to parse,” he said. “That reflects my ideas about reality and perception.”
Influenced by haunting images embedded in Tibetan thangkas, the work of Hieronymus Bosch and Andy Warhol, Tomaselli incorporates many dark themes into his bright body of work – floating eyes and severed hands, decaying animals and raging wildfires. It all makes for a complicated clash with our beautiful and messy world. His art doesn’t aim to escape reality. Instead, it opens an inviting portal for us to crawl inside and then be confronted by it.
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Untitled (2019), Acrylic, photocopies, leaves and resin on wood panel
Drawing much inspiration from the Spanish artist Joan Miró (1893-1983), who created colorful and whimsical works during the height of WWII as Europe burned, Tomaselli said, “The world may be going to hell, but art is still worth making and beauty is still worth looking at.”
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“Second Nature” occupies two main floor galleries in the Laguna Art Museum. The exhibition will remain through February 2, 2025.
Fred Tomaselli’s Second Nature will be on display at the Laguna Art Museum through February 2, 2025. For more information, visit their website here.
