With the news of a vaccine for Covid-19 last week, it was hard not to feel optimistic. A perfect moment to look at the work of an artist who combines the viral information of news media with the cosmic shapes of nature.
James Cohan Gallery in New York is showing the work of Fred Tomaselli, but thanks to the hugely improved global connectivity during Covid-19, I encountered the artist and his work through an online talk organised by Brooklyn Rail and led by its editor Toby Kamps. Tomaselli and Kamps met before, during a dinner in New York in 2017, during which they shared their views on what they both viewed as an apocalyptic moment (US politics and the election of Trump). Little did they know what was to come.
Tomaselli has always viewed the media with a mix of awe and worry, calling the continuous stream of information that is offloaded to us on a daily basis ‘a form of virus in itself’. Born in 1956 in Santa Monica, California, Tomaselli grew up with the artifice of Hollywood and Disneyworld, but also against the backdrop of striking nature. A graduate of California State University, he didn’t feel that much of a connection to an art world that consisted mainly of academic Minimalists, and for a while, he worked in a surf shop whilst immersing himself in beat and punk culture and psychedelic experiments. As he explained over Zoom, “[m]y work has always been a chemical cocktail, and when I got rid of pharmaceutical elements I guess I made up for it by using more and more of the buzz of the media.”
Spending New York lockdown in his Brooklyn house with limited studio space, Tomaselli found himself returning to the precise, intimate process of collage that he had developed in his ongoing New York Times series. He felt that he couldn’t ignore what was happening in the news every day. “Every day was another blow, one blockbuster headline after another. In addition, I was worrying for friends who became ill with Covid-19”.
In March 16, 2020 we see what at first sight looks like a normal front page, the headline ‘Fed Cuts Rates to Near Zero; Virus Toll Soars’ like the chorus of a song. But Tomaselli has reworked the image into an array of light and colour. The grand interior suggests we are in Grand Central Station, where a lone female figure can be seen trailing a suitcase and walking towards pitch-black exit. The rainbow of colours that arches over her highlights the woman’s loneliness, whilst at the same time making her universal. Is she walking towards heaven, or the abyss?
In March 14, 2020, just visible on the left is a man’s face in profile (a medical worker in Seattle, I was informed). But instead of the black reality of death and illness, Tomaselli inserts another, more uplifting reality: cosmic and aesthetic. For Tomaselli, interacting physically with the newspaper was like adding editorial input to the front page. Or, in his own words, “[i]t is my ultimate aim to seduce and transport the viewer into the space of these paintings while simultaneously revealing the source of their seduction. Truth and beauty, art and artifice.”
Tomaselli also started to elaborate on the cosmic shapes that he had developed in his larger resin paintings. Turning the process of the New York Times collages around, he took parts of written text out of the newspaper and re-arranged the letters into abstract forms, leaving behind the scale and dimensions of the original front page. These more abstract compositions are mind-blowing.
In one work (all works not showing the newspaper’s date are Untitled), a multitude of forms - circles, stars, diamonds, ellipses - burst out from a central point, a symphony of movement and colour and intricate patterns against a cobalt blue backdrop, the colour of a bright, Californian sky. Detached from the page of the newspaper, the black and white letters function as formal elements in their own right. The media that shapes reality is in turn shaped by it, like a planet circling the sun. Inside the rings of these mandalas and ellipses are more layers with images of birds and eyes and hands: luminous stratospheres populated with the flora and fauna of our natural world.
In another collage, the background is a photograph, dark silhouettes of trees against a maroon sky. Tomaselli has lifted lines of newspaper text and re-arranged them in circle formations, alternated with lines of colour. He then photographed the main circle and repeated it smaller and smaller still, like an infinite constellation of itself. By containing the text in these cosmic forms, death and illness are lifted out of their context and turned into something soothing, something bigger than us.
Other works contain the shapes of birds, composed of images found on the internet, mostly of plastic objects, painstakingly cut and glued together into the bird’s fragile body. Tomaselli’s brother is an avid birder, but it was only during lockdown that Tomaselli himself finally found the time to really look at birds, get lost in the moment.
Cosmic theory, tantric shapes, religious iconography, folk art: grand themes of science, history and art seamlessly blend in with the remnants of our information-saturated age. The works are dazzling and mesmerising and grand, as if we are viewing the world through a lens of psychedelia, seeing right through the detritus of the everyday and into the very essence of our universe.
Tomaselli may look at the world from an agnostic space, but his images are close to the divine. “I see the transcendental moments”, he says towards the end of the interview, “falling into a picture, falling into the face of a wave. I want to give my audience that same experience. The world may go to hell, but beauty keeps being worth looking at.”
Fred Tomaseli is at James Cohan Gallery until 21 November
The Brooklyn Rail conversation between Toby Kamps and Fred Tomaselli can be viewed here.
All images © Fred Tomaselli 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d'Heurle.
