Essay by Elenore Welles ArtScene Monthly Digest to Art in Southern CaliforniaVol: Thomas Frontini’s oil paintings are based on the premise that no matter how we may change and advance technologically, human consciousness is stuck in instinctual traps. Since this sad fact dooms man to a never-ending cycle of repeating past mistakes, Frontini translates dreamlike visions into parables of warning.

Although his fantasies evoke a surface irrationality, they often stem from reality based current events. Add inspiration from ancient myths and art historical traditions, and the layers of meaning are difficult to digest in one gulp. They percolate slowly through a mixture of symbolist alleg ory, ancient mythology and surrealist landscapes.

Like symphonic poems, general themes are loaded with significant elements that stress timelessness. The darkly humorous parable “Cell Phone Holiday Beach Scene,” for instance, depicts a scantily attired mother and child, together adrift on a tiny island. They are surrounded by potted plants and a child’s sand toys. In the distance, dinosaurs roam on an erupting volcano. Since this is a modern dream, mom is on her cell phone.

When 19th century artist Francisco Goya produced “Dreams of Reason Produces Monsters,” he warned that when fantasy abandons reason, it produces monsters. Although Frontini tempers his interior visions with reason, they often mirror depths of fear. In ”The Bold Future--The Battle of the Centaurs,” for instance, Frontini portrays the centaurs as half woman, half horse. Their innocent charm is an ironic twist on the roguish behavior of mythical male centaurs. They are enjoying a game of badminton, seemingly oblivious to the large flume of smoke that emanates from a nuclear plant behind them. The vivid blues of sky and water, plus a bright green lawn add to the incongruity.

Fantasy and reality are always clashing in our consciousness, particularly in our dreams. “The Painter Sees Only What He Believes” represents the essence of “magic realism.” Set within a deep umber landscape, a young boy centaur poses for an artist, who is robed and garlanded like an ancient Greek. What the artist is painting, however, is the head of a horse, a blantantly Freudian image.

Through strange juxtapositions, Frontini evokes the tense pull between present and past. At times his wry critiques of modern culture take a precarious slide into scathing indictments. Monstrous animals and strange hybrids, such as a cross between a sheep and a unicorn, may be genetic cautionary tales. . .beware of cloning.

In “Luxury Goods” it is consumer consumption that gets skewered. The small figure of a well dressed woman stands beside a large workhorse. In the fields below a giant Hummer is pulled by a horse. Although the painting appears childlike and primitive, the sophisticated arrangement and implications are provocative. Could our addiction to consumer goods and oil plunge us into a backward spiral?

The decorative qualities of Frontini’s vines and flowers hover on thethreshold of the absurd, particularly when they threaten to overwhelm the people and animals they surround. But it is also the very sensuousness of the flora and the lushly monstrous fauna that seduce us into Frontini’s extravagant fantasy world.

It’s difficult to assess whether his biomorphic beasties are projections of a psychological state, or manifestations of dreams that forewarn. Beware the dreams of reason . . .they can produce monsters.

Thomas Frontini Observations (Winter 2005)

The tragic fact of the human condition is that we tend not to learn from our mistakes and instead repeat them across our centuries, in different clothes and on different scales. The paintings in this series examines this consistent repetition of human behavior across history into the present-day and beyond into the future. We romanticize war, denude our landscapes, overtax our natural resources, glorify material wealth, and perhaps pay homage to the almighty minivan that defines suburban life. My paintings tackle these themes, from a humorous perspective. The use of symbolism from the canons of art history and literature, even in paintings set in the present-day, to echo Alphonse Karr’s sentiment that “The more things change, the more they remain the same.” The juxtaposition of the beautiful and sacred with the profane or morally-flawed is central to each of these paintings. I love beautiful things. I hope that these paintings will draw viewers in, inviting them to untangle and interpret the many layers of meaning and humor.

LIMBO KARMA The Paintings of Thomas Frontini ESSAY BY DAVID GIBSON (Winter 2005)

As a painter, Thomas Frontini is a very good spinner of tales. He sees magic in the mundane, and explores the themes of creativity, youthful experience, and the transformative power of the imagination. His characters contain a degree of emotional depth comparable to those in narratives. They arise out of myth and memory, and often enter from his intimate emotional life, and aid him in dramatizing various parables on creativity, family, and the search for identity. They project a quality of innocence that is part fancifulness and part fantasy, affirming Frontini's earnest appreciation for the rigor of dreams. The structure of fantasy has its base in allegory--the construction of an ethos through divergent modes of expression. A fantasy is more than a single fabrication, but a complication of means in collusion towards the end of setting up an exception to the mundane upon the model of an ethical exception. By creating an atypical progression of the real, the enabler of fantasies is creating a morally ambiguous but fresh universe to which we can easily apply new experiences and values. The stories of Thomas Frontini are each paeans to the mysterious yet curious imagination of children. In some cases they are learning to see, in others they are caught as if by a photograph in moments of leisure and possession that underscore the degree to which common experiences such as a day at the beach may be transformed into a subjective realm of emotionally charged experience that will in later years represent the magical and immutable character of their early youth, untrammeled by adult contexts or justifications.

"The Artist Sees Only What He Believes (Nature's Apprentice)" shows a seated boy engaged in painting an image of his subject, another boy who happens to be a centaur, the creature out of ancient Greek myth who represented a primordial mingling of human intelligence and animal instinct. The painting upon his easel shows not the full figure of the centaur but only the face and mane of an actual horse. The horse which he paints is iconic, almost as if it were merely a statue in stone or bronze, a symbol of inherent 'horseness' that it is perhaps easy to forget when faced with a stunning creature such a centaur, who speaks with reason, and yet moves around in the world with the speed and ease of a four-legged animal. The element of overt unreality in this picture serves to illustrate the boy's understanding of nature, which is to say the separation of the character of his subject from his over manifestation in reality. Painting by young boys is not the same as that done by men; it is meant as a means of exploring the unknown in order to seek the origin of visual values that will translate into empirical ones. The boy in this picture uses his imagination to seek our essence instead of relying upon the details of an overly fantastic daily reality, forging a link between the imagination and moral character.

In "Girl in the Forest (Feral Princess)" we have another artist in training, who has stopped to turn her face to the viewer, and in this moment's repose, we are able to see her in her own sense of emotional stasis--a cipher for the sake of her art, and otherwise mute. The painting is a self-portrait but it is in great contrast to the figure herself and the dynamic yet sensuous genre of her immediate surroundings, which are filled with loaded meaning. She is accompanied by the figure of an elf, of the ceramic kind made to sit in suburban front yards for Christmas celebrations; here, in the lushness of spring he looks out of place, but he remains jolly, laughing loudly while holding onto his belt, as if he might lose himself to the force of his emotion. The woods around her are lush and deep, and the area immediately around her is filled with birds that flit about and, one can imagine, sing freely and with much animation, while she sits frozen, holding a ball upon which perches a small blue bird. The self-portrait at her side seems to echo her own stilled form, lacking only the ball and the bird. There is a quality of guarded, nearly malevolent patience in the young girl, as if she has been interrupted in the middle of very intent play--a ritual she values but which also represents her privacy. She waits to resume it while not indicating any other emotional trait; though her familiars, animal and mythological alike, continue undisturbed in the mischievous tenor of their day.

In "Everything She Needs (North Michigan Beach Scene)" the artist depicts the charming yet innocuous image of a young girl and her dog, a standard poodle whose fur has been sculpted and painted bright pink in a manner common to the pets of the wealthy. Though she is as tall as the dog, and though its very appearance marks it as the subject of certain female flights of fancy--typically girlish coloring, dressing up, etc--it is a large dog and its sheer size and directness of countenance also mark it as a protector or the girl, whose expression belies only the satisfaction of a carefree summer day at the beach. Again, in "Puppy an Ponies" a small girl is seated on a red and white tasseled rug accompanied by her pet, a small white dog, and in the presence of two large domestic horses, and upon the hindquarters of one of them, a small pink owl. The horses have white flowing manes and dark glowering eyes, and stand quite still over her, one facing the viewer, the other turned aside and moving his head to correspond to a likewise perspective. The ground around them is covered with the deep marks of their hooves and the scene behind them shows a path between hills with a light blue and ever deepening dusk. In both of these paintings Frontini depicts the close relationship between animals and children, in which the child attaches herself to them not only as familiars of the natural world, which animates their emotional desires and hides them from adults with their rules and sensible teachings about "the way of the world," but also they in some way become personas, friends and gods in one instant. The child has one main desire: to remain in the moment; to continue the level of instinctual learning that need seek only further sensation, and to revel in instinct as a disavowal of intelligent learning.

Finally, we have the oblique yet earnest image of "The Birth of the Great Balladeer" in which the artist portrays a very fantastical scene underscoring the desire for popularity, even heroism as presented by the innate ability for song. The image shows a large pool of water with coral, seashells, a starfish and lobster in it, and amidst all this, four beautiful mermaids wave to the viewer while holding large red conch shell upon which stands a gangly and pale naked young man holding a guitar, ready to play. The sky behind him is filled with the inverse plume of a nuclear explosion, as if the magic of his ability were instantly transmitted to heaven. This image is part revelation of myth and its place in poem and song, and part repressed fantasy. The balladeer and the painter have much in common; each expresses an immutable truth but suffers for it to be borne through the inequities of the role the artist has in everyday life. His is not viewed as a practical function in society, and the gains are less immediately recognizable than those conferred by wealth or power. He may be loved or admired, he may even alter the fabric of reality, but he belongs to myth. The mermaids in this painting are not mothers for they have no human wombs; they are like spiritual sisters who have produced, through sheer force of will, a spirit of creative expression to give value to the nature of experience on the human plane of existence. They are presenting a gift to man and will soon recede into the mists of time. Like Venus on the half shell, the poet stands for love even as he stands alone, an antihero who cannot partake of what he offers.

The paintings of Thomas Frontini all ask a very basic question: Where does imagination come from? Clearly, it is born in the mind of the child, a mental construction of reality which stops time and reverses the normal flow of logic to serve fantastic and sensate ends. The child possesses an imagination that has not yet been curtailed by adult logic, the burgeoning impulses of maturity, or by too much factual knowledge. What the child understands has been gained mainly by a degree naive empiricism, which includes the imaginary and mythical tales which he or she has been told. We tell such tales to children because we hope to instill in them a fascination for the unknown, and because such tales, beyond their overt veneer of symbolic reality, also contain idealistic values that should predate any harder truths to come along later in life. Imagination comes from being innately innocent, believing that all things are possible. The paintings of Thomas Frontini are one step in the right direction. Essay by David Gibson _____________________________________________________________________________

Review by Zachary Lewis (Winter 2005)

Thomas Frontini -- Convivium 33, a new gallery housed in an overhauled Catholic church, is an enormous artwork unto itself, with its high arched ceilings, intricately carved woodwork, and raised altar. It's also huge, with wall space sufficient for major shows and gathering room enough for a small cavalry. Its inaugural exhibit features the equally distinctive paintings of Cleveland Heights artist Thomas Frontini. Complex, poignant, humorous, and wildly allusive, Frontini's work harks loudly back to the Renaissance, when cherubs, angels, and other mythical creatures were prime painterly subjects; but he also keeps one foot planted firmly in the 21st century -- Hummers and airplanes are everywhere. His flat, mural-like pieces center around human subjects, which are often dwarfed by timeless landscapes and the animals, both real and imaginary, that inhabit them. Frontini's imagination is breathtaking, his interests vast. Juxtaposing old artistic clichés with modern reality is his best trick, exemplified in "Bold Future," in which two centaurs play badminton near nuclear towers. Best of all, he has a sense of humor, and he doesn't spare himself: In "Birth of the Great Balladeer," a young man with a guitar (Frontini as a teenager?) stands proudly, like Botticelli's "Venus," on a clam shell, this one supported by mermaids. We should be glad he went into art instead. Through January 29 at Convivium 33, 1433 E. 33rd St., 216-881-7328, www.josaphatartshall.com. -- Lewis

Story by Benjamin Weissman (Winter 2005)

MR. PEANORSE AND THE NICE FAMILY

One finds fables in periods of violence, oppression, and cannibalism. Before dawn, to the surprise of no one, it was announced over the loud speaker that the President’s father, Jorge, had shot, killed and eaten his son, also named Jorge, in the oval office. In honor of the country’s collective repulsion and grief tri-colored flags drifted to half mast, yet one by one the flags kept on going all the way to the tops of their respective municipal poles after it was determined that a celebration was more in order. The collective sentiment: his murderous son needed to be stopped. Saturn’s Children Eating Returns to the 21st Century, ran one newspaper headline. Jorge the elder, Does the Right Thing, ran another. When the church bell struck eight I lifted my spongy brain and the cranium that contains it into the air and threw it across the lake in the direction of the pyramid, the palm tree, and the pram. A humble sound greeted me, echoed back, a base note, my own personal thud. I had been living in Echo Park for the last several days on the north side of the lake near the aquatic garden that featured dozens of giant water lotuses floating on rubbery dark green pads. With Walt Whitman in my heart, healthy, free, the world before me, I felt around for my bedroll and started in the direction of my percussive head, a difficult walk, my bare feet cooperating fully with the pebbly ground, which is to say, tender sensory pads struggled with the heavy force of gravity, sharp pointy edges afflicting harm, subtle tortures. O, how I wished myself to be leathery and calloused, but I had not lived outside long enough to acquire a sturdy exoskeleton. A family of three appeared, this black haired, bare-chested man in lipstick, a blond curvy woman-mother, and a child, all beautiful perfect creatures in some way, and an assortment of frivolous pets such as a baby giraffe, who kept licking the man on the mouth, removing his lipstick, and he, with hands on his hips, French kissing the giraffe back, while instructing the child not to feed their big thick horse any more hay, a Clydesdale with a grim sparrow perched on its back. The woman opened up a purse in the shape of a starfish and out flew a heron that flapped over my head and shat out an oblong pill or pod that floated gently to earth somewhere behind me with the aid of a parachute. A small man, the shortest I’d ever seen in my life, touched my shoulder. “I can help you get your head back if you like,” he said, a face exploding with good cheer. “I’m not in any rush,” I said. “Really, why so blasé about it?” “Maybe I can replace it with something less burdensome. There’s something remarkably good about not having one of those,” I said. I pointed to his. “As you can see,” the little man said, as if he were the host, extending an arm, waving it across the landscape, “there are a lot of cerebral options here in the park, but you’ll need your own real head on your shoulders for the long haul.” “You’re a sensible man,” I said. The corners of his mouth rose and his gray eyes brightened. He had a great deal of mascara on. “My name is Mr. Peanorse. I am from Austria,” he said, “I was born on a glacial tongue at the base of Mt. Grossglockner, the highest peak in Tyrol.” His hands were tiny and white, softer than any hands I’d ever seen or touched, hands that felt like a tiny piece of mush formed into three fingers, with virtually no bones, but his head was proportionally enormous, extremely pale, the skin nearly washed out with a thin layer of frosting on the surface, and little white hairs spouting in the usual human places including big tufts projecting from the ears and nose. He had a full white beard and a smear of rouge on both cheeks. A rambling voice came over the loudspeaker. The president’s father read a poem explaining his patriotic actions, his dire attempt at saving the country, congratulating himself for being brave. “Who put the ape in apricot?” he said in a nasally voice that attacked my sinuses. “He’s ripping off the Wizard of Oz,” Mr. Peanorse said. “I didn’t know the father wrote poetry,” I said. “All people do before they die,” Mr. Peanorse said. “I supposed it deadens the shock.” I found a handsome orange mushroom growing out of a log and inserted it into my neck where my head previously resided. “Does this mean the father is going to kill himself now?” “There’s more protein in a mushroom than people think,” Mr. Peanorse said. The family took off their shoes, their white day-glo feet illuminated from within, dozens of tender little toes pulsing ever so slightly like a chorus of well mannered guppies. My poor unfortunate faraway head that rested on its large left ear—I could see it quite clearly next to a bench, looking lonely—sent vivid details back to me, a strong whiff of roses and mold. The woman’s toes flexed upwards indicating beverage time. The family possessed elaborate picnic gear and within minutes margaritas were fired up from a battery operated blender. The tongue in my mouth licked its lips. O how I love tequila. “Are you hungry?” Mr. Peanorse asked, “because if you are I have a specialized diet of apples and crackers designed to fill the belly but not fatigue motor functions with excessive blood flow to the stomach, which causes drowsiness, or what my mother called “moose fever.” From across the park the child walking the Clydesdale pointed in my direction. I waved. She waved. “I’m such a sap,” Mr. Peanorse said. “It’s just so moving. His mouth opened and pulled downward into an ugly cry. He dropped his crackers. “The little girl and you,” he said. I wished he’d stop. I felt my face, the long stem, and reached up to the top of my head which was velvety. What did the girl see when she looked at me I wondered silently to myself? “A scarlet waxy cap,” Mr. Peanorse sobbed, reading my mind, lengthening and strengthening his weeping into bigger and broader gusts which resembled an accordion player hitting wheezy mournful notes that required rearing back on his tiny heels with all his stumpy weight. The father, whose lipsticked mouth had widened into a clownish hooker leer from the extensive giraffe licking, squatted over my head and groaned. I could sense him above me. I feared the worst; his rear end continued downward until he sat directly on me like a basketball causing the lips on my displaced head to pucker, which he seemed quite aware of because he generously lowered his margarita to my lips and dribbled me a slushy gulp which melted in my mouth. Hand in hand the mother and child approached us, a gigantic pink poodle beside them. Big Victorian curls looped off the sides of the poodle’s head. The dog was quite calm, appeared to need no leash, always fascinating, the cross-species bond, and towered over the child. “Would you like a slice of my birthday cake?” the cheerful girl said. She looked like a thousand daisies molded into a child. “I’m seven.” In order to be polite I shook my head yes, but there was no cake that I could see, and, as a general operating principle, I hate cake. “We forgot to bring a knife, Mommy,” the girl said, her mood wilting. I pulled out my switchblade and handed it over to the little girl. I bent my knees and did an exaggerated do-it-like-this gesture with my thumb. She pushed the button and out popped the blade. She hopped into a wide ready-stance and pointed the knife at me. “I kill you,” she said, and laughed. The anxious poodle opened its mouth, squeaked out a yawn. “No killing honey,” the mother said, touching the child’s head. And then to me, “She’s just worked up over the president’s father. What he did. It’s just so remarkable.” Mr. Peanorse and I nodded in agreement. The girl lifted the switchblade and cut a deep slice into the center of the poodle’s head—no doubt, a living cake, the freshest kind. “We forgot to bring plates, mom,” the girl said. I held out my hands. She dropped a slice of pink poodle cake in my hands. The ear quivered slightly and the eye in the cake remained open. The mother reached over and kindly closed the poodle’s lid on my slice. I took a little lick of the ear frosting which tasted more like old salty pot roast. Infinitely better than regular cake. “Do you like it?” the girl asked. “I kind of love it,” I said. The rest of poodle took a few steps toward me and with three quarters of a head sniffed my crotch. “You are quite large,” I said, addressing my comment to the bridge of its nose and the missing section of the animal, the gap, afraid to look the poodle in the eye. The poodle drifted down to my pant leg where it began to lick. People often misconstrue canine licking as some type of affection or sign of love when it’s actually just a search for meat. This poodle considered me a slab of meat. “She thinks you’re jerky,” the mother said, reading my mind. “I think your head is a meatball,” Mr. Peanorse shouted inappropriately and launched himself in the direction of the mother’s face and snapped his teeth like a protective turtle. “Scary, you and your explosive nature,” the mother said, raising a hand, stepping backwards, “with your large incisors and claws and webbed eyelids.” “Is that what I look like?” Mr. Peanorse asked. “No, actually, you look like a bowling pin dressed in a Santa costume.” I’d been wanting to say that for a while. The president’s father burped over the loud speaker. He didn’t sound well. He said his son tasted like chicken livers and water chestnuts wrapped in bacon. “That’s disgusting,” the little girl said. “No, it’s not,” the mother said, “that’s rumaki.” A man clad in golf pastels ran into the park waving a gun. He appeared fragile but he moved quickly, his jittery mint colored legs striding towards us. The old chess players ducked under their concrete tables. Two boys jumped off the seesaw. The gunman was Jorge, the president’s father, in person. Such an unstable person. I bent down to one knee, lowered my mushroom cap, and put my arm around Mr. Peanorse. Together we huddled beside the mother and daughter and the giraffe to avoid eye contact with Jorge Sr. The Clydesdale took a mad panic shit and bolted away. The president’s father took aim at the baby giraffe and shot it in the chest. Blood streamed out sideways like a fountain, a five foot arch. The giraffe squealed, staggered away from us, back and forth, he didn’t know what was happening. Neither did we. Why would the president’s father shoot the beautiful giraffe? “Because it was kissing me. It, ” the father said, tears in his eyes, “as if that sweet beautiful creature were an it. He kissed me and I kissed him, his wet nose, his funny teeth, his grassy breath, and that terrible man can’t understand the love between a man and a giraffe. And my giraffe paid the ultimate price.” Uncertain who to kill next the president’s father held the gun with both hands and moved in nervous ugly circle. He fired a round at the basketball hoop that ricocheted into the bushes, and another errant shot at a honking goose. The Clydesdale reappeared, opened mouthed and furious, its long neck like a dragon’s, and slammed head first into the president’s father who flipped backwards onto the ground. His head cracked open. The president’s father writhed around underneath the horse for a brief moment, between its heavy hooves, and then the Clydesdale stomped him to death. “I thought we were going to have to use you as a weapon,” I said to Mr. Peanorse. “I’m so glad we didn’t have to do that.” “Call me Hubert.” Mr. Peanorse said affectionately. “Okay Hubert. You’re such a perfect projectile. Has anyone ever told you that? “Well, thank you for saying so. I’m flattered you thought of me as a weapon, a person first, a compadre, a weapon second. To be useful spiritually and physically is more than a small gentleman could want.” “I kept looking at your body and clothes wondering where it would be best to grip you so I could throw you like a projectile because the force of you striking another man’s head could render him null and void.” “As a person, I’m only 25 lbs, but as a mortar round I become quite the hefty pay load.” The father, mother, and daughter dug a big hole in the ground and buried the giraffe and the president’s father. The Clydesdale, the great protector, walked back to their side of the park. The family followed. “What about your head, Mr….? Mr. Peanorse said. “Sporocarp,” I said. “I believe it is my obligation Mr. Sporocarp to retrieve your head for you. I promised earlier,” Mr. Peanorse said, but it wasn’t his obligation, yet I was quite moved that he remembered. I reached up and again touched the top of my smooth mushroom cap that protruded outward in a perfect circle and thought how infinitely better I felt as a reproductive fruiting body. I didn’t miss my real head at all. Plus I liked having such a pronounced annulus under my gills and veil. “I think fungus will get a great deal of pleasure knowing you,” Mr. Peanorse said, his mascara running, “and if I may say,” he paused for a theatrical sniff, “your cap looks like a parasol.” “To the lake?” I asked, a grabbed Mr. Peanorse by the ankles, his green rubber boots. “To the lake!” he said. I lifted him into the air and with one hand swung him around my head several times like a mace, and then let him fly out over the water.