Tom Holmes’s New work successfully combines aesthetic modes that seem incompatible at first, blending the corporate brashness of commercial design, the subconscious expression of automatic drawing, the pared-down forms of Minimalism and the silvered surfaces of Warholian Pop Art. In the two large canvases from which Holmes’s third show at Bureau derives its familiar title (“L’Eggo My Eggo®”) waffle boxes look as though they were attacked by a finger-painting infant in the throes of a sugar high, while in the three accompanying sculptures, house bricks and folding chairs get glamorous, reflective veneers.
Holmes, who lives and works in Tennessee, collaborated with a hypnotist to achieve the seemingly uninhibited scrawls of paint and ink that partially cover his canvases, evoking comparable exercises by artists from Robert Rauschenberg and Kelley Walker to fellow automatist Matt Mullican.
The chaotic mash-up of printed ground and brushed addition suggests a deeply ambivalent attitude toward the construction of American childhood, specifically its enthusiastic manipulation by corporate interests. Holmes’s sculptures, by contrast, present a cooler meditation on the body in space, employing a very different kind of surface manipulation—the application of silver foil or chrome plating—to complimentary ends.