“The idea is that sleep might just be a perceptual issue, that it’s as much about perception as it is about actual sleep,” he continues. “I think it’s creepy. And it’s fascinating. Well, I’m taking it tonight, for sure,” he adds with a laugh. At which point, his brain now heavily lubricated, his bespectacled eyes looking a little more focused, he segues smoothly into his work. Perception, he argues, is also at the heart of art, or at least “all good art, all interesting art.”
To be sure, Tomaselli, from the dawn of his practice, has explored the murky zone between artifice and reality. His early installations were immersive environments meant to be experienced by the viewer. In Cubic Sky (1987), still hanging in his studio, modular facsimiles of the constellations descend from the ceiling in a cluster and glow with blue stars when the room is darkened. “When I was making this, I was thinking that looking up at the heavens was man’s oldest way of turning his back on the world,” Tomaselli says. “I also got to containerize the infinite, which was funny to me. I also kind of got to be God; I got to create this universe.” His collage paintings, also known as hybrids, are similarly sensory. Brightly colored mash-ups of teeny-tiny pictures cut from magazines and books—a kaleidoscope of butterflies or snakes, for example, or human hands, eyes or mouths—and paint, the hybrids also incorporate organic material. Some are eerily calm, while others practically explode from the surface. Tomaselli’s latest endeavors—hallucinatory treatments of front pages from The New York Times—are bold juxtapositions of cold reality and formal abstraction, his way of “talking back at the news.”
Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, the director and chief curator of the Aspen Art Museum, where Tomaselli will be the subject of a survey show opening August 1 as well as the recipient of this year’s Aspen Award for Art, notes that his collage Red Butte appears, from a distance, to be a painting of a grassy field against a desert mountain. “When you look closely, you can see it’s marijuana leaves,” Zuckerman Jacobson says. “It’s almost like an opportunity to make sure the viewer’s paying attention, and that’s one of my favorite things about contemporary art: It gives us another perspective on our life and on our reality. I think Fred is saying, ‘Look, are you paying attention? You know, wake up.’”
It’s all too easy to pinpoint the likely genesis of Tomaselli’s fascination with visual trickery: He grew up in the shadow of Disneyland. An oft-told tale of his youth is that the first time he saw an actual waterfall in nature, he kept searching for the hidden plumbing.
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