Fred Tomaselli’s Read, White, and Blue

Before we depart UnBeige HQ for a long weekend of fireworks, nationalistic cupcakes, and multiple viewings of Kieślowski‘s three colors trilogy, we wanted to leave you with something nice to look at: Fred Tomaselli‘s “Sept. 15, 2005″ (2009), a gouache on printed watercolor paper. Think NYT on LSD. In her excellent feature on Tomaselli in the July issue of W, Julie Belcove describes the artist’s recent “hallucinatory treatments of front pages from The New York Times” as “bold juxtapositions of cold reality and formal abstraction.”

For Tomaselli, they’re a way of “talking back at the news” that began with doodling—on the Times‘ March 16, 2005 front-page photo of Bernard J. Ebbers, the disgraced former CEO of WorldCom, leaving a New York courthouse with his wife and a string of fraud convictions. “Even though he was a wretched man, I was touched by him holding hands with his wife,” explains Tomaselli in W. “This sort of Paradise Lost seemed to have the relationship to paradises involved with taking LSD.” The result was “Guilty” (2005), a trippy reimagining of the Ebbers’ exodus. See more of Tomaselli’s multilayered world next month, when the Aspen Art Museum mounts a mid-career survey of his two-dimensional works that will be on view through October 11 before traveling to Skidmore College’s Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery and the Brooklyn Museum in 2010.

(Photo: Erma Estwick)

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