Behind Your Eyes
Behind Your Eyes is a roughly life-size mixed media painting made with pills (Tylenol, Advil, Tums, and various placebos), acrylic paint, and resin. The pills are arranged so as to depict a frontal male nude as seen in an anatomical drawing. The pills define the body's outer edges and internal musculature, while skeins of red paint, which course from top to bottom, represent its circulatory system. A thick layer of resin, endowed with a sensuous materiality, covers the surface of the panel. The figure is set against a flat black background punctured by what look from a distance like stars but which are in fact more pills. As a result, the figure seems to float, unmoored, concretizing the experience of physical and psychic transcendence. With a body that functions as a depository for pharmaceutical chemicals, one liberated from both the planet and the laws of gravity, Tomaselli's figure is the visual manifestation of an "altered state," of the alternate reality that lies "behind your eyes." As the artist once said of the psychedelic and pharmacological materials he uses in works such as this one, "Instead of traversing the bloodstream to affect perception, they travel through the eyeballs."
Artwork Details
- Title: Behind Your Eyes
- Artist: Fred Tomaselli (American, born Santa Monica, California, 1956)
- Date: 1992
- Medium: Pills, acrylic, and resin on wood panel
- Dimensions: 80 × 30 in. (203.2 × 76.2 cm)
- Classification: Paintings
- Credit Line: Gift of Jonathan Y. Lukoff, 2019
- Object Number: 2019.473
- Rights and Reproduction: © Fred Tomaselli
- Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art
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