NEW YORK, NY.- Skoto Gallery presents Plight, an exhibition of recent paintings by Stuart Diamond. This is his first solo show at the gallery.
For almost four decades Stuart Diamond has cobbled together discarded objects and disparate images in an attempt to reconcile contradictory human imperatives: to plunder and salvage, to hoard and display, to assemble and squander. His earliest ‘constructions’ were built from debris scavenged from the sidewalks around his Soho studio as the neighborhood underwent the transition from industrial to commercial. His reclamation not only saved wasted industrial materials from becoming yet more industrial waste, but up-cycled factory-made artifacts into art, thereby preserving the value of artisanal labor in a vanishing economy.
Diamond's most recent work crystallizes this lifetime’s preoccupation with the refuse and fallout of cultures of consumption and exploitation. For many of the works in Plight, Diamond has dredged the history of maritime painting, hauling in the metaphors of castaways, murky depths, and shipwrecks. Painted in sludgy grays suggestive of toxic spills and bad weather, these are not the sun-drenched seascapes of Turner and the Romantics. They are freighted with references to environmental catastrophe, resource scarcity, and waste. Other images have spilled over from previous series, caught in the great gyre of the artist’s imagination.
Submerged in the roiling deep of Stuart Diamond’s strange aquatic universe—where sumptuous steaks are beached alongside a stranded whale, a forlorn rhino is adrift in a shopping cart and a pair of toy soldiers march in lock-step with some hors d’oeuvres—is a resolute affirmation of the act of painting. According to Diamond painting is an ark, a port in a storm and a storm in a port; it is a careening ship laden with trash and treasure. When painting, all is sunk, all is afloat. A plight, though a quandary, is also a solemn pledge, a commitment. So the unsettling predicaments and preposterous encounters in Diamond’s paintings remind us that anything is possible: destruction and absurdity surely, but also rescue and tenderness. Distilled through 40 years of painting, the elegiac works in Plight intimately contemplate personal and artistic legacy, and our shared human history.
Stuart Diamond is a New York artist best known for ambitiously scaled painted wood constructions. He has had 9 solo shows in the United States, and has exhibited extensively in France, Germany and China. He is represented in numerous collections including MoMA, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, Gainsville, Florida. He received his BFA in painting from Pratt Institute. He is currently Professor of Painting and former Department Chair at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. He currently resides in Providence, Rhode Island.
This exhibition is accompanied by a portfolio of drawings. Viewing is by request.
