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拍品专文
Unclassifiable hybrids, Fred Tomaselli's works resist classification and offer an entirely new field of artistic exploration. The artist approaches painting as a form of sensitive experimentation, a visual and intellectual trip into his own psychedelic universe. Influenced as a child by the world of Walt Disney, and then growing up as a teenager in California's drugs and surf counter-culture, he attempts to create an artistic style that unites these seemingly different moments of his life.
Study for Big Hummingbird is a prime example of Tomaselli's unique technique. He works by slowly building up the image with successive layers of colour, before applying a coating of resin, and then continuing to paint on this lower level. Starting on a wood panel with a black background, he depicted the subject, in this case one of his favourite wildlife topics, the birds, using photo collage and acrylic. Adding new details to each strata of resin, he achieves the effect of depth which, combined with the richness of colour and the unique graphic style, serves to produce a beautiful, almost hallucinatory outcome.
The result of Tomaselli's work is that he succeeds in combining and synthetising all his influences into an original half-surrealist half-postmodern aesthetic. As he explains, 'I like to think that the materials I use are all interchangeable, all capable of manipulating reality in perpetual, hazardless potentiality. It is my ultimate aim to seduce and transport the viewer into the space of these pictures while simultaneously revealing the mechanics of that seduction. In other words, I intend the paintings to vacillate between the pre-modernist window and the modernist mirror.' (F. Tomaselli quoted in J. Yau, Fred Tomaselli, Monsters of Paradise, exh. cat., Edinburgh, The Fruitmarket Gallery, 2004, p. 43).
Study for Big Hummingbird is a prime example of Tomaselli's unique technique. He works by slowly building up the image with successive layers of colour, before applying a coating of resin, and then continuing to paint on this lower level. Starting on a wood panel with a black background, he depicted the subject, in this case one of his favourite wildlife topics, the birds, using photo collage and acrylic. Adding new details to each strata of resin, he achieves the effect of depth which, combined with the richness of colour and the unique graphic style, serves to produce a beautiful, almost hallucinatory outcome.
The result of Tomaselli's work is that he succeeds in combining and synthetising all his influences into an original half-surrealist half-postmodern aesthetic. As he explains, 'I like to think that the materials I use are all interchangeable, all capable of manipulating reality in perpetual, hazardless potentiality. It is my ultimate aim to seduce and transport the viewer into the space of these pictures while simultaneously revealing the mechanics of that seduction. In other words, I intend the paintings to vacillate between the pre-modernist window and the modernist mirror.' (F. Tomaselli quoted in J. Yau, Fred Tomaselli, Monsters of Paradise, exh. cat., Edinburgh, The Fruitmarket Gallery, 2004, p. 43).