Fred Tomaselli

The Fruitmarket Gallery’s 2004 Edinburgh Art Festival exhibition presents the work of Fred Tomaselli, a New York-based artist whose meticulously-crafted ‘hybrid pictures’, made using a dazzling array of materials including paint, pills, insects, photocollage, leaves and flowers, have gained him a reputation as one of the international art world’s most rapidly rising stars.

Tomaselli was born in Santa Monica, California, in 1956, and grew up ‘so close to Disneyland’, he says, ‘that I could sit on my roof and watch Tinkerbell fly through the night sky’. Idealised, theme-park reconstructions of reality have always been part of his everyday life, and his art engages with the utopian/dystopian dialectic of all kinds of artificial paradise.

The artist’s collaged paintings are obsessive compendia of the natural and unnatural worlds. Real pills sit alongside painted pills, while cut-out photographs of flowers, insects and leaves jostle for attention with their carefully-pressed and preserved real-life counterparts. Over-the-counter remedies, medicinal herbs, prescription pills and psychotropic plants were among Tomaselli’s first artistic materials. Equating their mind-altering properties with the idea of painting as a window on to another reality, the artist effectively alters their use, diverting their point of entry into the body so that they attack the brain via the eye rather than the bloodstream. Tomaselli desires transcendence and transportation, and so makes deliberately seductive images, exquisitely beautiful explosions of colour embedded in layers of slick, glossy resin.

‘I just want to make art that is about something real. And as far as I’m concerned the most real thing in our age is the unreal. The unreal has become far more powerful than the real. Virtual reality, computers, the Internet, movies, drugs, theme parks, malls, gene-splicing and plastic surgery all play a part in the vast menu of artifice. The present mutability of reality is one of the main issues separating our culture from that of our parents.’

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Fred Tomaselli