Suburban Sublime • Michel TOMBROFF

How did a car ride affect art history forever? Michel Tombroff, through a series of recent artworks entitled «Suburban Sublime», takes us on a journey to relive the event that precipitated art’s transition from modern to post-modern. Inspired by a paragraph in sculptor Tony Smith’s 1966 Artforum interview describing the revelatory experience of his 1951 car ride on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike*, one of the most repeated anecdotes in the annals of contemporary art, became the script of Tombroff’s project. Tombroff embarks the spectator on a virtual ride on dark freeway segments, interchanges, bridges and passes to reflect on Tony Smith’s epiphany: « The road and much of the landscape was artificial, and yet it couldn’t be called a work of art. On the other hand, it did something for me that art had never done. At first I didn’t know what it was, but its effect was to liberate me from many of the views I had had about art. It seemed that there had been a reality there which had not had any expression in art (…) There is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it.”» Suburban Sublime’s aim is to resuscitate it. Not that evanescent reality, long gone. But that experience. Prof. David Salomon – author of “The Highway Not Taken: Tony Smith and the Suburban Sublime – writes of these new artworks: Tombroff’s work is nothing if not art. Its complex surfaces, shapes, and lines are engrossing. They also require sophisticated spatial skills to comprehend and create. They are also models. Not models of past or future racetracks or highways. Nor models of ideal or dystopian landscapes. Rather, they are models of intense, confusing, intoxicating, mischievous, but real objects and experiences that are possible when one creatively reconfigures (and multiplies) the existing elements we find at our disposal.”