The Brooklyn Rail

Tim Stoner’s highly wrought new paintings combine immediacy and distance. Immediacy is achieved through the attractions of their rich surfaces, full of linear structures and vivid details that weave in and out of complex, textured layers. Distance comes from the sense that his images exist at least one remove from both the visible world and from their primary sources, namely Abstract Expressionism and the British landscape tradition, particularly the work of David Bomberg. For a number of years, Stoner followed in Bomberg’s footsteps, painting in Ronda in southern Spain, but here his example is less pervasive. At his exhibition at Modern Art, London in 2020, Stoner presented theatrical, highly stylised Bombergian landscapes, overlaid with equally stylised calligraphic abstract structures. The work at Pace shows him moving toward a purer, if still highly filtered language of abstract painting, in which the example of de Kooning comes to the fore. There is still a distinct sense of artifice in Stoner’s images, but this meets a new directness and a greater willingness to allow the candor of painterly gesture into his art.

Stoner’s productive uncertainty about abstract art is rooted in a sense of having arrived after modernism’s end. But it also continues an ambivalence toward modernism in Britain. Looking at Cave (2020–2025) initially brought to mind kitsch St Ives-style paintings I recently saw in a London gallery that uncritically repeated the semi-figurative style of the 1950s. Stoner’s project conveys a different level of seriousness and visual ambition, aware of the gap that separates us from the mid-twentieth century, even if hopeful that it can in some way be bridged. Cave is a hard to grasp painting. Different levels of coiling, serpentine marks almost completely crowd out an underlying suggestion of landscape. De Kooning’s flux and flexibility appears in clarified form, transcribed into fractured, artificial rhythms. Arrayed across Cave’s surface are rectangles made by abrading previous layers of the painting. Rather than evoking a narrative of erasure, the rectangles suggest windows or light falling through windows. This creates a dancing spatial interplay across its surface, but also serves to subtly disorientate the viewer, drawing us into the image, while introducing an ambiguity about exactly what we are looking at. The formal coincidences between his paintings and the original, archetypal St Ives figure of Peter Lanyon stresses the point that while Lanyon’s images were chasing, even if quixotically, the direct experience of place, Stoner’s approach emphasizes the removal from place, as if stepping into a hall of mirrors.

Stoner also cites classic New York graffiti as an influence. The attention-grabbing virtuosity of a large piece is more to the point than the hasty scrawl of a tag. The presence of graffiti is less overt than in recent years but is still evident in the proportions, composition, stylization and dynamism of Stoner’s paintings, also in their limited sense of depth. For all the three-dimensional effects graffiti artists employ, their images tend to affirm the solidity of the wall they are sprayed upon. Something similar happens in Stoner’s images. His illusions only go so far before they seem to meet a sheer, impenetrable surface in a manner that is analogous to but distinct from the declared flatness of modernist painting. Many artists have used graffiti to critique painting’s exclusivity, to flatten or attack distinctions between high and low. Stoner’s project is intriguing because this critique is not part of the agenda. The structures of graffiti are present within an almost pre-modern sense of painting as a fastidiously crafted luxury object, a decoratively dense, sensuous stage set. His precisely delineated ribbons of color recall the draperies that are a central part of the Western European painting tradition, while Persian Red (2009–2024) seems almost as much a wall-hung tapestry as a painting. Stoner is not involved in the type of quotation that fixes its source as a moment in art’s recent past. Rather he seems to attempt to submerge himself in his predecessors’ images, exploring them as worlds in themselves. Sixteenth century Mannerism is more relevant than postmodern irony.

Persian Red and Rewind (2018–2024) are the most recently completed paintings, and those with the longest gestation. They also move furthest away toward pure abstraction. For all of their beauty, do this pair too fully resolve the contradictions that seem central to Stoner’s art? By contrast, the most startling painting shown here — Reflection (Caribbean Blue), (2021–2024) — is the one that most overtly stages a confrontation between an abstract visual language and one rooted in landscape, observed or encountered in the history of art. A view downward onto a range of hills, with sea beyond, is overlaid with three distinct layers of marks. Although it opens up the image’s virtual depth, the view appears as much a representation of a painting, as a sight directly rendered onto the canvas. The marks that largely obscure this backdrop combine fluidity with precise, even pedantic delineation, and at times appear carved as much as painted. In a more complex manner than Cave, these marks’ abstraction is suggestive of reflections in glass or light on a surface. Again, our sense of orientation is undermined, but here almost vertiginously, as we shift from an aerial to a straight-on view, from closed to open space and from nearness to depth. Some paintings in the exhibition have a somewhat vague overall image, and need to be entered into to be enjoyed, but Reflection (Caribbean Blue) communicates its ambiguities with directness and clarity, in a single flash of an image.