[My past] affects every creation I made –it’s all there in my art. It helped my art. I always want just as much good in the paintings as the bad so that there’s always hope. I try to make them have universal meaning –struggle, happiness, sadness, hope.

–Tom Torluemke1

Art can permeate the very deepest part of us where no words exist.

–Eileen Miller 2

In the summer of 2024, Tom Torluemke had a major exhibition of works on paper at the Chicago Cultural Center. Many of the works were noteworthy for their bright and elaborate layering, of color, particularly in the medium of watercolor. They depict everything from nearly psychedelic abstraction to shimmering hallucinatory landscapes, from amorphic bodies interacting and meeting in complex spaces to the interiors and exteriors of suburban homes. At a casual glance, the intricate luminosity of the color and the soft outlines of the shapes present a decorative, eye-pleasing aesthetic, scenarios of harmless whimsy, caricature and fantasy. On deeper inspection, details suggest darker realities. Symbols of fatherly attire, such as a necktie or a leather belt, seem tainted with menace. Occasionally, male figures have skulls for heads. In the doorway of a bright tree-lined suburban home, there appears to be a figure hanging from a noose. In one sunny-colored watercolor, a menacing male figure is charging up a staircase seemingly ready to beat children for smoking, while another shows a shattered glass bowl containing cookies spilled all over the floor. Naked women and men are woven into the abstract patterns of his compositions while sexual trysts seem to be happening in the backyards of suburban homes. In one work, a woman in a pointed cap appears to be disintegrating under the pressure of deep sadness. In the corner of another composition, a bare-bottomed boy sits on the knee of a menacing man. Throughout all of this work, people seem to be trying to connect with each other emotionally and trying to cope with potentially dangerous situations. Yet the soft edges, bright colors, and abstract nature of these works seem to bathe their subjects in a protective fog, making them dreamlike and equivocal. It seemed as though stories embedded in these images were both suggested and obscured at the same time, presenting a mystery that piqued my curiosity.

        Torluemke’s recent exhibition of pencil and ink drawings at Bert Green Fine Art offered clues about these enigmatic scenes, replacing their introspective fluidity with a sharp focus on the outrageousness and cruelty of human nature. His Everyday Monsters drawing series acts like a magnifying glass focusing a spotlight on “all our worst traits and behaviors.”3 The acerbic use of caricature to portray this grotesque side of human nature reminds me of similar themes in the work of the nineteenth-century artist James Ensor which expressed no end to what can be sardonically derided about human nature. Dehydrator depicts a creature with a sponge for a body and straws in its feet and mouth sucking up the last drops of water in a deserted landscape. I see it as a cutting commentary on the corporate privatization of all freshwater sources to the point of turning the planet into a lifeless desert. Looking for a Slice of Life scornfully mocks its own title. The Zen-like “charm of everyday experience” has been replaced by a multi-eyed alien wielding blades on its tentacles. Littered around it are the decapitated human heads, torsos, and disembodied limbs of its victims—the life got literally “sliced” out of them.” Self-Satisfied ups the ante on symbolic contempt, this time showing a giant erect phallus with a rubbery trunk masturbating its stalk as its blinkered eyes look heavenward. Its scrotum, or perhaps buttocks, sit upon a fiercely taloned body stump. As a final twist, the whole monstrosity sits in a landscape of coins stretching to infinity. It brings to mind the narcissism, sexual addiction, and compulsive greed that perfectly aligns the child sex-abusing wealthy class found in the Epstein files.

        Tastemaker takes derision to equally intense heights—a freakish creature made of four round orbs with human eyes balancing on legs made of soft mushy matter. But the orbs are actually buttocks topped with pubic hair and the legs are composed of feces that spout from the monster’s four anus “mouths,” leaving a trail of wet turds behind it. Tastemaker feels like a ferociously scatological way of symbolizing the excrement that passes for aesthetic value in our late capitalist times. One need only witness the bilious kitsch that populates the art market, not to mention the ridiculous cycles of feckless art speculation driven by a tiny clique of pathologically rich investors, or “tastemakers.” It brings to mind James Ensor’s most radically subversive print, Doctrinal Nourishment, depicting the Belgian king with members of his clergy and military sitting on a wall while defecating on the populace below. Several of the Everyday Monsters have details that might hint at the innocence of childhood toys—striped straws, bug-like antenna, or the head of a doll—making them all the more perverse as attributes of such pathologically dangerous creatures.

        Several large works embody stark social themes, such as Shame—an impressive drawing used for the creation of one of Torluemke’s large oil paintings. The image is carefully rendered using graphite, charcoal, and acrylic on blue tinted paper, inspired by classical techniques with a nod to the drawings of the twentieth century artist, Paul Cadmus. A naked man standing on a stump covers his groin as he is viciously pelted with fruits and vegetables by a crowd of onlookers. He seems to be a modern Saint Sebastian attacked for the transgression of his nakedness and, by association, his sexuality. Several faces of men in the crowd are contorted into violent screams of hatred, while the face of a sexy woman glances knowingly at the viewer, implicating us to join in with the crowd’s degrading act of humiliation. The precision of detail rendering everything from clothing and human musculature to baskets of fruit gives the image a strange sense of suspended time, as if to say ”it has ever been so.”

        Another major drawing, Drag Race, also a sketch for a larger painting, depicts the opposite of what you would expect on a race car speedway. There are no fast cars, but a line of exhausted naked men dragging the collapsed bodies of others behind them. The track has grooves from the rounds of dragging etched into the cracked dirt track, an extension of the barren industrial wasteland that stretches into the distance. Many women in the audience scream and howl from the sidelines, urging their chosen man to pull ahead of the others. Are the dragged bodies of men unconscious or were they killed in some violent competition? Is it a test of who has the most endurance as proof of their (toxic) masculinity? The humor that initially draws us in reflects back a grim sarcasm: humanity is trapped in a “no exit” social and environmental crisis of its own making.

        Several works use humor in a psychosexual vein with a good bit of levity. Wetting the Watercolors portrays the artist spraying a tray of watercolors to paint his nude wife Linda modelling for him on a mattress: the innuendo of desire leading to foreplay cannot be missed. Primary Inspiration depicts a surreal studio scene with canvases stacked everywhere and giant tubes of paint scattered on the floor. The striding naked figure of Linda holds an empty frame to her face as the nude artist swoons in amazement and sexual arousal upon beholding her visage. Painting, sexuality, and life in the studio are intertwined with witty word play that expresses intimacy and desire.

        One room in the gallery is dedicated to drawings of landscapes and woodland scenes, a dramatic change from Shame, Drag Race, and “Everyday Monsters.” Turning to nature feels like an oasis for self-reflection, a place of emotional healing and connection to find peace within the self. As with many artists before him, the beauty of nature becomes a way to heal and regenerate oneself from the turmoil of human society.

        Across Torluemke’s work, nakedness seems to reflect humans in their raw “uncivilized” state, genitals and all, sometimes expressing vulnerability but also transgressive acts that aim to puncture the boundaries of entrenched social morays. His protagonists often play out unvarnished drives and impulses that shake us out of our everyday expectations or frames of reference, which is what gives his works their compelling edginess. They make us sensitive to the power of irrational instincts and inner demons that conjure the social disarray and violence that so often lies below the surface of “normal” everyday life.

        Torluemke grew up in a North Side Chicago neighborhood in the 1960s and 1970s with a father who was the “worst out-of-control violent alcoholic.”4 Tom and his mother were subject to regular bouts of domestic violence and abuse until his father abandoned the family. His mother, though a resourceful and “super tough woman,”5 also faced profound personal struggles with depression and alcohol from coping with near deadly domestic violence and the trauma of having been gang raped. But there were also pockets of support and protection for Tom. His mother encouraged his early passion for art, and he avidly communicated with his deaf and mute great-uncle Freddy by drawing pictures to “speak” to one another, inventing flights of imagination they shared together. “I drew and painted ever since I was a little kid… I did it all the time. Creativity was totally an escape. I was making stuff that was otherworldly because I think I wanted to get away from my world.”6

        The dysfunction in his family caused by deep intergeneration trauma made Torluemke sympathetic to others facing adversity and “opened the tolerance to work with difficult subject matter.”7 Art had always been that safe space to express his inner psychic reality, a practice that animated an imaginative drive taking many different forms. I find it compelling and courageous how the artist is willing to confront dark uncomfortable truths about human behavior—deeply emotional human truths that can be as hard to look at as they are as hard to not look away from.

        As a means of accessing his imagination the artist often practices making drawings with his eyes closed—automatic line drawings that range from abstraction to figuration and everything in between. The Surrealists discovered automatism as an exercise to release what lies below consciousness and free the mind from rational control. Drawing with your eyes closed or blindfolded makes the process even more mysterious: a fearless dive into the inner self, letting images rise from the subconscious and following any suggestion wherever it may lead.

        These works are only a fraction of multiple forms and mediums the artist works in, including sculpture, oil, painting, watercolor, mosaic, collage, mobiles, installations, performance, assemblage, murals, and more. This protean propagation shows Torluemke’s absolute openness to whatever his mind can conceive of. Few artists are as “mind-boggling versatile, and maddeningly prolific across disciplines”8 even on a national level. This absolute freedom is the complete opposite of the reductive “branding” that the art market imposes on artists if they want to be a success in the art world– a contemporary commentary I cannot miss in his drawing Tastemaker. Out of inner necessity and endless drive, Torluemke freely embraces the multifaceted possibilities of his imagination while working through his past, expressing both the good and the bad, and all that lies in between, of which human beings are capable.

Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic who lives in Evanston, IL. She is a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant Recipient who exhibits internationally. Her work is in the collections of the Milwaukee Art Museum, the National Hellenic Museum, the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, the Block Museum at Northwestern University, and the Illinois Holocaust Museum, among many others. For more information and to read more of her published art writing, visit dianethodos.com.

1. Tom Torlumke: Live! On Paper, 1987-2024 . Jeff Huebner- Tom Torluemke interviews February 11 and February 26, 2024 Dyer Indiana. pp. 115 – 6
2. Eileen Miller quote from The Girl Who Spoke with Pictures: Autism Through Art
3. Email from the artist
4. Tom Torlumke: Live! On Paper, 1987-2024 . Jeff Huebner- Tom Torluemke interviews February 11 and February 26, 2024 Dyer Indiana. pp. 116
5. Ibid p. 117
6. Ibid p. 116
7. Ibid p. 118
8. Ibid p. 116