Since the late 1980s, Fred Tomaselli has been creating meticulously crafted works incorporating ‘everyday’ objects such as pills, leaves and cut-out images from catalogues suspended into several layers of resin and acrylic paint on board. Executed in 1993, Fade into You is a prime example of Tomaselli’s exquisite and astonishingly elaborate technique. His art is the result of a highly refined craftsmanship which seems to emerge from an ancient world.

Growing up in Southern California in the 1970s, the New York-based artist was part of the generation which searched for utopia through punk rock and drugs. Tomaselli has never hidden references to drug culture in his own work: "My generation had a hand in debunking the myth of the sublime but I couldn’t deny my chemically induced personal experiences. In a world dominated by exterior media manipulations, how fake was an experience generated from within the body?" (Tomaselli, ‘My Chemical Sublime’, in Fred Tomaselli: Monsters of Paradise, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 2004, p. 43). As with his other works, Fade into You incorporates pills as decorative elements that, connected to each other by golden-leaf arabesques, take part into the artist’s creation of a seductive, almost hypnotic, world.

Tomaselli’s oeuvre derives from a startlingly wide range of cultural references, from the Old Masters – such as Hieronymus Bosch and Arcimboldo – to contemporary performance, pattern and decoration, underground comics, punk graphics and psychedelic kitsch. But, most of all, the lies in the ability to address human beings’ desire to escape reality. By raising the opposition between nature and culture, between real and fake, the hallucinatory dimension of his work opens up windows on new worlds, suggesting that the true place to be looking for utopia is our own mind.