Fred Tomaselli, 1956 | A "beautiful" virus

Fred Tomaselli is an American artist🎨. He 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.

Tomaselli's paintings include medicinal herbs, prescription pills and hallucinogenic plants alongside images cut from books and magazines: flowers, birds, butterflies, arms, legs and noses, which are combined into dazzling patterns that spread over the surface of the painting like a beautiful virus or growth.

He uses an explosion of color and combines it with a basis in art history. His style usually involves collage, painting, and/or glazing. He seals the collages in resin after gluing them down and going over them with different varnishes.

“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”

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Tomaselli sees his paintings and their compendium of data as windows into a surreal, hallucinatory universe. “It is my ultimate aim”, he says, “to seduce and transport the viewer in to space of these pictures while simultaneously revealing the mechanics of that seduction”.

Tomaselli has also incorporated allegorical figures into his work - in Untitled (Expulsion) (2000), for example, he borrows the Adam and Eve figures from Masaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden 1426-27, and in Field Guides 2003, he creates his own version of the grim reaper.

His figures are described anatomically so that their organs and veins are exposed in the manner of a scientific drawing. He writes that his “inquiry into utopia/dystopia - framed by artifice but motivated by the desire for the real – has turned out to be the primary subject of my work”.

Fred Tomaselli è un artista Americano🎨 che lavora con materiali non convenzionali e crea incredibili universi surrealisti.

È nato a Santa Monica, California, nel 1956. Attualmente lavora e vive in Brooklyn, New York.

Il creativo ha studiato alla California State University di Fullerton e come professionista gode di un notevole riconoscimento.

Le sue opere comprendono dipinti, collage, installazioni o parti di assemblaggio bidimensionali.

Sebbene geometria e motivi siano una parte fondamentale del suo lavoro.

Pertanto, erbe medicinali, pillole di prescrizione e piante allucinogene o immagini ritagliate creano fiori, uccelli, costellazioni ed altro ancora.

L'artista contemporaneo utilizza costantemente pannelli di di legno Come base per le tue creazioni.

Curioso e ossessivo trova anche un paradiso nel giardinaggio e nella natura.

Quindi è una figura chiave nella scena attuale, diversa e autentica.