Visual Arts/Reviewed - Monsters of Paradise, Fred Tomaselli, Irish Museum of Modern Art: Fred Tomaselli's Monsters of Paradise at IMMA fully warrants the use of the term hallucinatory.
There is, first of all, the mind-boggling intricacy of his images, composed as they are of masses of collaged and painted details. These details comprise vast numbers of preserved butterflies, pressed flowers and leaves, myriad brightly coloured pills, together with photographs and illustrations of human body parts, especially hands and arms (but also countless eyes, ears, noses and other details from anatomical manuals), snakes, insects and, again, flowers. Plus of course paint in the form of gouache.
They make up patterns and representational images that have a ritualistic, symbolic character. You wonder at the sheer labour involved, but it's not just the level of detail that is startling. Tomaselli doesn't go for straight representational likeness. An outline of a human head, for example, will be recognisably that, but packed to bursting with dozens of clustered eyes, noses, mouths, ears, plus hands, flowers and fungi, all in a teeming mass that suggests a frenetic liveliness. There is something excessive about it, as well, as though it's out of control. More positively, perhaps, the luxuriant plumage of his Big Bird is composed of marshalled ranks of photo-collaged flowers.
Everything is fixed in layers of transparent epoxy resin like insects in amber. The effect is not unlike the computer-generated three-dimensional coloured graphics that were in vogue a decade or more ago. In Tomaselli's work, each layer of resin adds physically to the depth of the surface so that the images are in fact three-dimensional. His use of psychotropic pills and cannabis leaves as well as all those pharmaceutical products is appropriate given the disconcerting strangeness of his pictures, both optically and intellectually.
Nor is he at all evasive about it. He grew up in Southern California, so close to Disneyland that he could "watch Tinkerbell fly through the night sky". Coming of age in the 1970s, and hence having missed the Utopian idealism of the 1960s counterculture, he took to "a mutant excess of PCP and arena rock", he writes. The emergence of punk "gave a shape to my pursuit of oblivion", but he did not take to the hardcore that succeeded punk and was driven back to acid, which "got me close to the sublime".
Escapism is generally regarded as a bad thing, but he couldn't quite see it like that.
A move to Brooklyn gave him a useful degree of perspective and his work since has grown from the idea of painting as a window onto another reality, a window that looks both inwards and outwards. The drugs still transform our consciousness, but they are absorbed via our eyes in Tomaselli's ingenious configurations.
Taken at face value, his work might be viewed as a paean to the "chemical sublime". But there is a serpent in the garden. Tomaselli may start with the dream of escape, and for him escape entails some element of getting back to nature, but as he sees it, "nature is riven with infection, pathology, pain and pollution". To his mind, he lives in a world in which cultural differences are not so much bridged as collapsed into uncontrolled hybridisation. To address the world is to negotiate information overload.
His images provide a lively account of what this might feel like, so much so that he views what he does as, in curator Fiona Bradley's phrase, a quest for a "pathology of everyday contemporary life". Rampant hybridisation is a good description of his own hypnotic paintings. They are technical, stylistic and cultural hybrids. In his use of the imagery of natural history studies, he recalls the taxonomic zeal of Victorian naturalists. His source sheets of fragmentary images suggest the obsessive mentality of the compulsive collector. His radiantly patterned compositions evoke psychedelic and visionary outsider art, but also the elaborate structure of Buddhist mandalas. His extraordinary Heavy Metal Drummer is a cross between Keith Moon and a Hindu deity.
He creates personal mythologies and cosmologies. One of the latter, reproduced in the rather beautiful catalogue but not part of the show, is a stellar chart of All the bands I can remember seeing. One that is included in the show is a pharmacological cosmology in which the points of light have the titles not of stars or constellations but of drugs. It stems from an earlier work, which combines all the drugs - legal and illegal - he remembers taking together, with all the birds he remembers seeing in his lifetime, linking drug use with the desire for flight and escape.
Writing in the catalogue, John Yau describes Tomaselli's human figures as being "flayed". It is one way of putting it but it risks misrepresenting the spirit of the images. It is the equivalent of art historians describing Picasso's Cubist figures as tortured or violently assaulted because they are distorted in terms of conventional representation. That is, it's an overly literal reading of a pictorial strategy directed towards dealing with something beyond outward appearances.
Yau argues that Tomaselli's work demonstrates the continuing viability of painting as a medium equal to the complexity of contemporary experience. While the work certainly doesn't do anything to contradict painting's viability, that is probably too sweeping a claim. There is a distinctly retrospective quality to Tomaselli's fascinating though idiosyncratic vision. His use of unorthodox materials and his distinctive working method produce remarkable visual effects and a rich fund of meaning.
At the same time, there is something inflexible and stilted about the finished pieces, so that you feel the visual exuberance of his images functions within stringent limitations. A couple of the wittiest pieces are small collages, pages from a field guide to birds in which the outlines of the birds have been filled with images of zipped fleeces from clothing catalogues. They take flight, so to speak, more readily than Tomaselli's weightier productions.
On show until June 19th (01-6129900).
