ON VIEW
September 16 - October 24
Emblem and Epigraph/Curses and Catchphrases
Fred Stonehouse, Paintings 2015-2025
The paintings in this exhibition, spanning the past ten years, demonstrate many of the recurring themes in my practice: devils and saints, mythic hybrids, buffoons and imaginary beings paired with cryptic words and phrases. I have long been fascinated by how text can work in conjunction with images, not so much to close the loop or limit how a piece is understood, but to suggest a more compelling or complex possible narrative. I have often said that I’m interested in how text and image can relate tangentially. The way a phrase can rub up against and create tension in an image and resist easy interpretation is what I am after. I like to think that the more I say and the more I show, the less literal the connections become. The approach is more poetic than expository and the affect or attitude of the work is, hopefully, more mysterious and magical as a result.
Another thing that I have been saying about my work for years is that it exists somewhere between a joke and a prayer. The humor in my work is obvious I think and serves as a foil to some of the darker psychological themes, but the way I think of painting as prayer is not as supplication, but more as a sort of reflective stillness, waiting for an answer. There is a piece in the show with the following text that references this sense: “He struggled more and more with learning new things, but he knew things he had never learned.”
