Michael Tole
Sea Gods
2022

About the Item

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 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: 18 in (45.72 cm)Width: 24 in (60.96 cm)

Medium:

Oil,Panel

Movement & Style:

Contemporary

Period:

21st Century