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Michael Tole
Cleopatra, Having Reconsidered Suicide, Passes the Basket to Octavian
2022

About the Item

Michael Tole says of his work… This painting reimagines the moment when Cleopatra contemplates suicide after her battlefield loss to Octavian. In this revisionist history, Cleopatra thinks better of suicide, and at the last minute redirects her servants to pass the basket of fruit with the asp on to the triumphant Octavian who sweeps in with his entourage. In this scene, Octavian reaches for an apple, triggering the asp to strike. This, like most of my recent work, reimagines historical, mythological, and literary motifs to destabilize the inherent power structures within those narratives. The style adopted is Rococo, which coincided with the rise of Colonialism. The style therefore relates to the historical narrative of this piece which shows the conquest and colonization of a colonial ruler. In my current work, The Revisionist Histories, I am writing letters to art history, literature, and mythology in an attempt to reflect the social changes that have reshaped our society over the past century. As part of this agenda, I explore the evolution of gender norms, power dynamics, and representation within Western visual culture and what this implies for the negotiation between pleasure, justice, and our culturally specific discourse on beauty. The seed for The Revisionist Histories was sewn when I caught a glimpse of my preteen daughters watching music videos on their iPad as I chopped veggies for dinner. Out of the corner of my eye I caught glimpses of music videos featuring Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Katy Perry, and Doja Cat gyrating across the tiny screen. A better parent might have snatched the iPad away, but I was overcome with hallucinatory visions of this pop diva pantheon dancing through the painted ceilings of Versailles and countless Bavarian Chapels. Watching these videos, I observed that they employed an aesthetic that rested comfortably within Baroque and Rococo parameters, exhibiting chiaroscuro, ostentatious displays of wealth, over-the-top emotionalism, fantasy, self-aggrandizement, pastel color schemes, gender fluidity (a trait more Rococo than Baroque), and heaping piles of conventionally attractive young women in provocative poses. The new themes of female agency, diversity, and inclusivity were unquestionably positive additions to Western visual culture, yet some of the similarities between Katy Perry and Fragonard seemed to merit further consideration. Since that initial revelation, my research has expanded to include the entire fantasy industrial complex, from Hollywood and Las Vegas, to advertising and social media. Through their conflation of art history, mythology, literature, and pop culture, these paintings attempt to sus out the implications of the observable ascendancy of a fantastical, luxuriating Rococo-esque aesthetic in our contemporary visual media. We may not normally consider the genre of teen pop music videos and TikTok posts to be fodder for philosophical reflection, but the fantasies they create reveal truths about us, and those truths deserve our conscious consideration. To explore this, I set out on a mission to master Baroque and Rococo pictorial rhetoric, believing it to be the best vehicle to explore the continuity and disjuncture between 18th and 21st century Western visual culture. I intend to create paintings that can hang side by side with old master works in a museum that, viewed at a glance, do not stand out from their neighbors, but upon further inspection begin to reveal to the viewer those aspects of culture that have evolved, and those that have remained the same over centuries, inviting comparison, analysis, introspection, and perhaps a chuckle. ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ Michael Tole is a figurative painter currently living in Tempe, AZ with his wife and two daughters. Born in 1979 in Dallas, Texas, he graduated from UT Austin with a BFA in painting in 2000. A year later, he became the youngest artist ever represented by Dallas’ Conduit Gallery where he showed for 15 years. For the first half of his career, he created photo-based paintings of retail interiors that explored issues of class, and the relationship of painting and photography. After relocating to Tempe, his work experienced a significant shift to fantastical figurative inventions based on pop culture imagery he has encountered via his two daughters’ taste in music videos, and his new proximity to the twin capitals of America’s fantasy industrial complex--Hollywood and Las Vegas. The new work attempts to contextualize their brand of Disney-esque hedonism within a broader historical view of Western visual culture. Mr. Tole’s career includes shows in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, and New Orleans. He has won several grants, including the $50,000 Hunting Art Prize, and the Kimbrough Grant. His work has been reviewed in Art Forum International, San Francisco Chronicle, and Dallas Morning News.

Creator:

Michael Tole (American)

Creation Year:

2022

Dimensions:

Height: 48 in (121.92 cm)Width: 48 in (121.92 cm)

Medium:

Canvas,Oil

Movement & Style:

Contemporary

Period:

21st Century