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Fred Tomaselli

Exhibition — les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse

Fred Tomaselli, exhibition view, Les Abattoirs, Toulouse, 2005
© Printemps de Septembre, photo André Morin

Fred Tomaselli, exhibition view, Les Abattoirs, Toulouse, 2005
© Printemps de Septembre, photo André Morin

Born in 1956 in Santa Monica (USA), he lives in New York.

 

The work of Fred Tomaselli is marked by the experience of psychedelic vertigo, induced by the various hallucinogenic substances with which he freely experimented in the 1970s. Today he creates hybrid objects, what one might call collage paintings, which he makes out of diverse materials: paintings, objects, insects, pills, psychotropics, and medicinal plants, all fixed in resin. These compositions present hallucinatory images, explosions of colour and pattern which offer a feast for the eye and the imagination.

 

Tomaselli advocates a transcendental art, suggesting an equivalence between the visual experience of his work and the properties of the substances the memory of which he preserves in this way. Offering a new interpretation of the concept of the painting as window onto another reality, he explores the unmatched potential of the imagery of the unconscious.

 

A selection of his recent work will be showing at Les Abattoirs, by way of introduction to the exhibition as a whole.