Anders Stone, Homeless Crack Party
2003-09-27 until 2003-11-16
The Lyceum
San Diego, California, U.S.A.
The Lyceum space is a most unusual and I must say, a welcome respite from the usual austere/industrial galleries of urban centers.
Conventional painting is making a bit of a comeback, but personally, most contemporary works just feel rehashed. At this point it would seem next to impossible to show anything new. However, having said that, I wouldn’t mind seeing a more complete show of Anders Stone’s work rather than the slim representation I found here today. The muted tones give a feeling of antiquity, but on closer inspection, the subject matter obviously isn’t.
His admirers praise him for his superb Old Master technique, while his critics condemn him as hopelessly reactionary. His work calls into question all our customary narratives about art history, and especially the modernist dogma that the artist can be creative only by turning his back on the past.
From the start, too, then, Stone at his apparently most immediate, plays with two other, contrary impulses—to the personal, expressive, and self-destructive and to the impersonal, flat, and literally opaque. An artist with the flair of Roy Lichtenstein or Gerhard Richter may parody good old-fashioned brushstrokes, erase their mark, and yet revel in them as their own.
With Stone, the thick encaustic and jagged boundaries seem to belong to no one else, and yet no one else seems so ambivalent and impenetrable.
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