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Portfolio: A gallery of paintings by Fred Tomaselli Best viewed with browsers higher than 3.0

Tomaselli creates gorgeously pristine paintings characterized by mesmerizing patterns and a precise order that reference both early American Shaker quilts and latter-day psychedelic hippie art. Like much of his earlier work, "Gravity's Rainbow" is constructed from complexly overlapping garlands of pharmaceutical drugs strung like beads on a necklace. Hemp, datura leaves and cut-outs of lips, eyes, hands, birds, reptiles and bugs are draped in inverted rainbows of color against a deep black background, which makes the images appear to float in space. Layered over the real pills are garlands of painted pills. This creates a tension between the real, the photographic and the painted that is totally deceiving from a distance and rather mesmerizing up close, and provides a humorous and ironic commentary on the allure of mind-altering experiences and the unreliability of perception. The drugs, enough in any given piece to create a healthy overdose, are safely sealed away from use -- in enough resin to kill the average human being. His ironic play with the toxicity of beauty is a recurring theme in his exploration of the sublime.

Tomaselli, who grew up in the shadow of Disneyland, a self-professed "stoner without ideology," is on a quest for the sublime in places that would make the average new-age guru cringe. He traces parallels between Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond and David Koresh's compound at Waco; between the pre-digital immersive realities of the theme park, a gourmet trek to the top of Mount Everest and the transcendent hallucinogenic effects of LSD. All express a deep longing for a utopian experience that is, all too often, quenched with a "mother's little helper" or a stiff drink. It is through Tomaselli's appreciation of the seductive jewel-like qualities of these "mother's little helpers" that he finds the prima materia for his work.

Despite the title of the piece, Tomaselli resists allusions to the Thomas Pynchon novel "Gravity's Rainbow," except to say that he was enchanted by the inexhaustible hallucinogenic vision of Pynchon's masterpiece about the German blitz on London. He fought like hell against using it as his own title, but unfortunately, once the idea crossed his mind, the layering of brightly colored inverted rainbows won out. Now there is nothing left to do but dread a future full of well-informed questions about the connection to Pynchon.

On a tour through the studio, Tomaselli shows me flat files filled with sheets of calibrated paper cutouts of birds, flowers, body parts, hemp and datura leaves -- the tiny bits of things that make up the pixels, binary code, the DNA of his massive painting. What less could you expect from a guy with obsessive-compulsive tendencies who grew up on the modular delights of Legos, Lincoln Logs and the Erector Set?

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