LONDON.- Vardaxoglou is presenting ‘The Woven Field’, a solo exhibition of paintings by British artist Tim Stoner, inaugurating the new gallery space at 7 Royalty Mews, Soho, London. For the first time the gallery is presenting several of Stoner’s new large-scale canvases, the first exhibition of these works in over two years.
Tim Stoner has recently returned to the United Kingdom after a period of 20 years in Ronda, Andalucía to finish a number of these paintings having been unable to complete them in Spain due to Brexit. His life in Ronda has been the real propellor to his painting, rousing the heat-drenched images which are singed into the canvas. Stoner is known for large-scale masterful paintings which are charged with the landscape and energy of time and process. His paintings sometimes take years to complete and are well-versed in bending the parameters of the medium; some are worked on for up to a decade. Stoner consistently progresses beyond his comfort zone as a painter, and what the viewer has come to expect.
For Tim Stoner, a painting is like a time machine. Some made quickly hold only the moment of an hour or so, but when the brush is put down, time becomes frozen. As life moves on from its completion, it demands we inhabit the moment of its making from that moment on. Yet with Tim Stoner’s new paintings, time is expanded. Some works are painted over years and sometimes a whole decade; removing, re-applying and shifting things until something is revealed far from its inception. They exist as templates to record the shifts of behaviour and application made through the changes in the artist’s own life and perceptions, over the period of their making. Stoner makes diaries of existence.
One of the most important details of any painting is its surface; for example the weave of linen is a very specific material for the oil painter. Everything starts on it. It is the painter’s geographic mantle ready to hold crusts of paint. It’s the most important material holding the world together; the framework in which the DNA of paint will fall. In this universe the removal of paint back to its surface is as important as any plastic addition made over it. The painting’s surface starts to behave like the geography of a town or country where over time buildings are built and then demolished, shifting the cartography of place… trees are planted and then cut and refashioned for new images.
What Stoner’s paintings illuminate is how fragile the deliberations in a painting can be; the anxiety of how the motif is positioned within that window and how our emotional scope for the subject can be manipulated and even removed, like an act of erasing one’s own life.
