Tom LaDuke | Whitehot Magazine

We spoke for a long time about the history of his work’s development both in sculpture and painting, and how he goes about choosing the elements that are combined together in these complex imagistic arrays. These are large paintings whose range of stylistic approaches is achieved in virtuosic displays of pure painting. He said to me, “Each image that I use in my paintings come from experiences that I have had; being with my Father when he died and feeling as though for a moment I could see and feel what he was experiencing; to moments from films that are loaded with meaning; or quoting from works of art that are important to me. These are not arbitrary choices but are combinations of narratives that feel true. It is like when a bell is rung. It has a feeling of truth to it and that is the feeling I have when these combination of images come together in my paintings.” 

In the painting, the pit in the hole, he uses a near photo-realistic painting of the gallery Sadie Coles HQ in London as a background. It is a portrait of a gallery as a rarified architectural space; a form of architectural specificity that is designed solely for experiencing art. It represents the gallery as a psychological state of consciousness that is a reflection of the artist and of the art world that they inhabit as part of a living cultural biome.  Within this luminous, pale gray illusionistic space, floats a spaceship. LaDuke designed this image using the digital tool Blender, morphing objects that he gathered from his studio floor into a shimmering vision: in this way he can insert himself into the painting.  The spacecraft hovers weightlessly, creating a mysterious vaporous reflection in the space surrounding it. In a sense, it becomes a portrait of the artist as a voyager; an explorer of the infinite realms of self and consciousness that he can experience through the process of creation. In the foreground, several passages of lush, thick, vibrant painterly impasto offer a dramatic contrast with the low contrast gray of the background. The grisaille floral painting on the lower left is a copy of a painting by Don Brown that is based on a Henri Fantin-Latour painting.  Urs Fischer’s melting lamppost is suggested by the center vertical swipe of thick paint in pink striations. To the right, is a fragment of a Sarah Lucas sculpture and the upper right brown passage refers to the Chinese artist Yu Ji. LaDuke said of this painting that these references to other artists is a form of homage, and that it is a pleasure for him to paint them and through the process of painting, to feel them through his hands and eyes. The paintings in this series are a form of self-portraiture, as well as a unique portrait of the contemporary art world. 

LaDuke uses homage as a method to connect himself to artists that he admires from the past and the present. They whisper to each other through time and through and the metamorphic materiality of paint. Painting, more than any other medium, conveys the central nervous system’s somatic record of one’s fleeting thoughts and emotions. He is capturing glimpses in the quicksilver stream of thought, memory and appreciation, of the artists and spaces that he feels an intimate connection to. In these image fragments, we can recognize something, even if we cannot place it, that rings a bell; and that is enough to open the door to see the whirling slipstream of our subjective experiences.