Michael Tole

Modern Marlowe

2022

Michael Tole is a figurative painter currently living in Tempe, AZ with his wife and daughters. A Texas native, most of his 20 year long career was spent...

Michael Tole is a figurative painter currently living in Tempe, AZ with his wife and daughters. A Texas native, most of his 20 year long career was spent in Dallas. After relocating to Tempe, his work experienced a significant shift from photo-based paintings of retail interiors to fantastical figurative inventions based on pop culture imagery he has encountered via his two daughters’ taste in music videos, and his proximity to Southern California and it’s particular brand of Disney-esque hedonism. Mr. Tole’s career includes shows in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, and Miami. His work has been reviewed in Art Forum International...

"Salute" is a salute to the Black Power Salute used as a political demonstration by African-American athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith during their med...

Michael Tole says of his work… My conservative, Church of Christ grandmother lived in a pristine little mid-century modern house in the middle-of-no-where, Texas. Its trim, Protestant exterior belied a decadent mishmash of sculpted chocolate carpeting, and gold gilt Rococo furnishings inside. Strewn about the living room walls were frothy little reproductions of pearly, 18th century goddesses frolicking amid forests and streams--mocking the clean modern lines of the room. These prints of Bouchers and Fragonards were so pretty, so decorative, so innocuous in their style that it didn’t occur to me until years later when I studied them in college that they were lesbian love scenes. In these anodyne fetes, young women roiled, breasts and bottoms abounding, gazed into one another's doe eyes, and caressed fulsome cheeks. Though overtly erotic, their style was so decorative and soft that even my religiously conservative grandmother experienced no cognitive dissonance between the racy content and her religious beliefs. I find this tension between style and content, fascinating. The trio of paintings: The Summit of the Gods, Sea Gods, and Modern Marlowe are an exploration of it. I am unaware of any equivalent all male scenes from the Rococo period. This appears to be an inherent bias within the tradition. With this work, I am trying to pry open the tradition and make a space the male figure as decorative--pretty. I say "pretty" instead of "beautiful" because the "beautiful" can be threatening or challenging. "Pretty" is a term we generally apply to unambiguously attractive, comforting, and accepted things: flowers, puppies, babies, etc. I want to know if men can be pretty in the same way those 18th century goddesses are. I think I’ve made a pretty good visual argument for that perception. I'll know I've succeeded if the next generation of grandmas can host their women's bible study group in a living room hung with these paintings. My grandmother likely bought these prints at about the time John Berger coined the truism: “Men act and women appear.” In one sense, this painting is asking if it is possible for men simply to appear, without a narrative justification. The mythological titles of this trio are intentionally vague enough to let the images reside mostly in a non-narrative context, placing emphasis on its aesthetics, not its story. 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...

An abstracted view of the Art Institute of Chicago's Grand Staircase. The lone sculpture fictionally represents an armed officer pointing a gun at an absent figure. [b. 1977 – New York, NY ::: lives & works – New Haven, CT] CHRIS BARNARD received his BA from Yale and his MFA from The University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles. Having previously held faculty positions at Denison University, Indiana University, and USC, Barnard is currently associate professor of art at Connecticut College in New London. Barnard’s work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and New Haven, among other locations, and can be found in public and private collections nationally and internationally. His work is represented by Fred Giampietro Gallery in New Haven, where he and his partner live. artist statement In my work I focus on white supremacy’s relationship to the privileged spaces of my experiences, such as private art and educational institutions. Amidst widening gaps in wealth and opportunity, discussions about race, power, justice and representation—across visual culture broadly—seem more relevant than ever. In many of my compositions, which reference real sites, I have inserted fictional elements to raise questions about the allegiances and priorities of these institutions, as well as people—including myself—who have benefitted from, or continue to support them. The resulting works are representational, but through gestural passages and color and surface manipulation, I aim to suggest instability, corrosion and decay. In the end, I strive to make engaging paintings that suggest dissonance and ambivalence, that entice and challenge viewers, just as painting them does for me. These paintings are rooted in my contemplating Whiteness and emerge from wrestling with the politics of painting—the connections and gaps between painting and lived experience. They also reflect: a love of paint, the act of painting, and the power of the painted image; a regard for practitioners past and present, as well as those for whom practice has not been possible; and an admission of painting’s complicity with hegemonic power. As always, my process remains driven by questions. In this case, questions like: What role does painting play in the face of concrete social crises? How can my paintings respectfully incorporate¬—rather than exploit—relevant and thought-provoking content and imagery? What does it mean to think about racism, dehumanization, injustice, etc., and then to paint such pictures, and in particular as a straight, White man? These questions and this body of work owe much to the work of others, and most acutely to four scholars’ books in particular: The History of White People, by Nell Irvin Painter; Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities by Craig Steven Wilder; The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander; and White Rage, by Carol Anderson...

ALEXANDER STOLIN, born and raised in Kiev, Ukraine (under the former Soviet Socialist Republic), where he received intensive training and a master of fine arts degree in his homeland...

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Work : Original Oil Painting, Handmade Artwork, Unique Work. Ready to Hang. Medium : Oil on coated wood. Artist : Raphaël Renaud Subject : Coin de VH (Title), (EN : Corner of VH). T...