Tom Fruin: Color Study by David Gibson

When Tom Fruin was first on the scene, with his installed collages of drug paraphernalia, I remember the excitement that these works incited. Here was an artist whose work was about introducing elements of the depraved, anarchic, and malevolent into contemporary art. The drug bags were a new element in contemporary mixed media art because they were not only an extremely marginalized detritus, but that they were also representative of the substantive presence of drug use within the art world. In some commons, the use of drugs is synonymous with success: the ability to acquire illegal substances being in some way a measure of the power of the user, and the freedom to use, or abuse them, proof of the legitimacy of the role of the artist, who will always exist in some way at the edge of society. 

At some point after 9/11 (the tragedy of which made all lesser attempts to pay lip service to the melodramatic role of the madman artist seem like caricatures), Fruin grew up. He graduated to utilizing the design related appearance of urban detritus in a manner that sits more squarely upon the shoulders of architecture, urban planning, and perhaps even manifest destiny. There is something heroic to the large scale sculptural works that are now his signature. The chockablock style he employs in their decoration suggests stained glass windows while simultaneously placing them in the utilitarian context of a water tower.

 

Fruin has always been enamored of the aggregate of physical signifiers that connect Pop Art to history, community, and culture; most specifically those accumulated objects that have some central nostalgic character. Their identity as iconographic signifiers of an underground illegal scene compounds an idiosyncratic symbolic character and makes them simultaneously oblique and exact. In their current version as highly polished puzzle pieces utilized as nostalgic glyphs providing the only textual branding in an otherwise abstract oeuvre, they establish the countercultural hegemony of Fruin's hidden milieu, part mood and part intention, like a demimonde scurrying at the margins of art world celebrity.

Though he currently eschews the retread quality of his old materials for a journeyman style of sculpture that both fits into the scenic life of the city and adds an ornamental quality to it, he has not lost an intimate connection to the vibrant community out of which it all first sprung, where he was one of a number of artists expressing the dirty mundane world of the city. In Fruin’s new work there is a joy wrought from his connection with the industrial history of the objects on display. They are colorful yes--even pretty--but they remain metallic, heavy, and relate to a working past that is at the heart of how a city becomes what it does. Nut by nut and bolt by bolt, metal gets laid down, connected, and melded, and it can hold anything, especially time. 

Tom Fruin "Color Study" at Mike Weiss Gallery, 520 West 24th Street, New York, September 4 - October 18, 2014