DAVID GIBSON WRITING

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 crea