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Brian
Tolle at Basilico Fine Arts - New York, New York
— By JANET KOPLOS
In "Overmounted Interior," Brian Tolle's
first solo, the gallery was altered by his installation of a huge brick
fireplace, massive ceiling beams and four leaded-glass windows providing
views not of the streets of SoHo but of charming rural roads and orchards.
These few simple elements were enough to create the effect of a low, dark,
heavy-beamed Colonial interior, even if it was immediately apparent that
nearly everything was fake. The too-shallow fireplace and the impossibly huge
beams were made of carved and painted Styrofoam, and the windows were light
boxes reproducing hand-colored photos from an old, romanticizing Colonial
Revival book.
In the instance of the windows, which had real
wood frames, diamond-shaped leading and wrought-iron hooks for the casements,
Tolle most clearly spoke of craftsmanship in its traditional forms. The
quality of illusion in the beams and fireplace was also impressive: the beams
showed giant knots and the raised-grain texture that comes with weathering;
the fireplace reproduced the mottled color of used brick and sooty darkness
in the baking niches. It was all very well done.
Accomplishing the fakery, which was mostly a matter
of separating craft from natural materials and practical purposes, and
bending it to creation that doesn't quite fool the eye but nevertheless
impresses the mind, seems the result of a distinctly postmodern
consciousness. Indeed, gallery information revealed that disjunction is
precisely what interests Tolle. His theatricality elicited a strong sensory
response to his created environment while maintaining an almost Brechtian
foregrounding of his manipulation. So the installation, for all its
structural presence, moody shadows and idyllic views, held in abeyance the
genuine experience of a place or a time. By addressing the layering of our
perceptions of the past, Tolle illustrated our estrangement from it.
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