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Maria Tomasula
The Music of Chance, 2004
oil on panel
48 x 36 inches
Maria Tomasula
The Sum of Coincidence, 2004
oil on panel
14 x 11 inches
Maria Tomasula
Fault Line, 2004
oil on panel
12 x 9 inches
Maria Tomasula
Looking for a Common Language, 2004
oil on panel
10 x 8 inches
Maria Tomasula
The Fabulous Confession I, 2004
oil on panel
48 x 36 inches
Maria Tomasula
The Fabulous Confession II, 2004
oil on panel
12 x 9 inches
Maria Tomasula
Signs of Intruders, 2004
oil on panel
20 x 16 inches
Maria
Tomasula
Claim, 2004
oil on board
14 x 11 inches
Maria
Tomasula
Held (funnel),
2003
oil on linen
48 x 36 inches
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Maria Tomasula: Vast
May 14 – June 26, 2004
Los Angeles, California - Forum Gallery presents the exhibition
Maria Tomasula: Vast from May 14 - June 26, 2004, with an opening
reception Friday evening May 14, from 6:00- 8:00.
This first exhibition of Maria Tomasula's paintings in California includes
sixteen exquisite, meticulous, and radiant still lifes, each replete with
its own allegorical meaning. By melding whimsical humor with imaginative
and spiritual inspiration the artist fully succeeds in delivering a poetic
vision of irreconcilable issues germane to our contemporary society and
the human condition.
Maria Tomasula was raised in the outskirts of Chicago. The iconography in
her paintings germinates from her religious upbringing and specifically
her Mexican Catholic heritage. Red mottles, disembodied hands and hearts,
dripping tears, doves and serpents disclose an intensity which one
encounters in Spanish influenced Catholic societies. Such symbols offer a
wide range of interpretable visual references such as the Sacred Heart,
Christ's passion, and ex-voto offerings of gratitude for saintly
intervention on behalf of a soul in need. These semblances and apparitions
convey sentiments ranging from piety to forgiveness and the exquisitely
painful path of redemption. They form the basic language this
extraordinarily gifted painter selects for personal expression.
While not purely religious expressions of a devotee, Tomasula's paintings
are a face to a worldly struggle by an artist attempting to illuminate and
reconcile diametrically opposed notions of 'believing' and not. Her own
forma mentis is perfectly attuned to address such a dialogue, as her
parents and grandparents were both divided along lines of faith.
In the painting Web a gloved fist holds a string onto which is attached a
halo of connected butterflies. The sense of entrapment and manipulation
generated by the exerted pressure of the controlling hand are assuaged,
even betrayed, by the shear beauty of the butterflies. Hence the painting
is a metaphor for the surreptitiously complex nature of religion and life.
Fabulous Confession I presents the viewer with the historically malignant
vision of a coiled snake who presents himself as less malevolent than
anticipated. Affixed with pins to his side are two delicate butterflies
and out of his open mouth flows a series of innocuous flower petals.
Again, Tomasula provides us with a metaphor for oppositional qualities, in
this case the insidious and potentially self-serving purpose of asking for
forgiveness.
Some of the paintings in the Forum Gallery exhibition appear to be
grounded by gravity, contained in a somewhat comprehensible though
improbable optical space. Others are nudged even further to pure
imagination and appear to float in a continuum of seemingly surrealist
impossibility. Whether the works give spiritual form to material concerns
or vice-versa, all of Tomasula's paintings call our attention to the
exhausting and interminable search to define in a world in which
everything is defined by itself and its opposite. Pluralism and the
complexities of heterogeneity make that quest all the more challenging.
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