Exploring a Realm of Intoxicating Illusions

As Fred Tomaselli’s new works at Christopher Grimes Gallery make clear, the question is not: Is art a drug? It’s: Just what kind of a drug is art?

For starters, Tomaselli’s big, eye-popping paintings knock your socks off as they open onto mind-boggling worlds more beautiful than the one they invite you to leave behind. When you’re under the influence of the show’s centerpiece, a 6-by-11-foot landscape glistening under the night sky, such mundane details as a blade of grass or a twinkling star appear to be so vivid, crystalline and dazzling that the rest of the world pales in comparison.

Tomaselli’s paintings of abstract patterns offer similar sensations, although with even greater intensity. A 5-foot-square image titled “Dead Eyed Bird Blast” pulls your eyes toward a star-shaped point at its center. To look at this mesmerizing picture is to feel as if your body is the starship Enterprise, as it whooshes through the galaxy at warp speed.

Illusions of all sorts are Tomaselli’s specialty. From across the gallery, his works appear to be seamless and slick. Up close, however, it’s easy to see how clunky and homemade they actually are, cobbled together from real stems, leaves and flowers, all manner of pharmaceuticals (both controlled and over-the-counter) and pictures cut from catalogs and field guides.

“Shack, Commune, Compound” explores various forms of utopian fervor, efficiently linking quasi-fascist settlements, hippie communes and religious retreats. To the artist’s credit, the boundaries between these ideologies are not clearly drawn. Viewers must decide for themselves where self-determination ends and fanaticism begins.

These days, many politicians presume to do this for us. Conservatives generally treat art as if it were a dangerous hallucinogen that makes people do stupid things, as it drives them further and further from the workaday world. Liberals pretend that art is a daily dose of vitamins, minerals and good sense, a miracle cure that builds virtue as it strengthens communities.

Tomaselli demonstrates that art is a medicine chest filled with stimulants that sometimes work wonders and at other times backfire. When it works, art doesn’t provide an escape from the world; it immerses viewers more deeply in life’s extraordinary complexities.

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* Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through March 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays.