Jason Stopa makes paintings-within-paintings that suggest multiple browsers open on the same desktop. A red background lined with yellow stripes and diamonds, for example, might feature two distinct foregrounds on two vertically oriented rectangles of the same size that contain more color and pattern. Such compositions complicate ideas of foreground and background; of surface and support.
Stopa said he ultimately believes that first and foremost, painting is “about color as light and light as space.” He’s interested in rethinking painterly space and connecting his ideas to the virtual, domestic, public, and interior worlds that he and his viewers occupy. The entire divide between abstraction and figuration seems retrograde to him, “a 20th-century problem.” He considers non-objective art impossible: The brain is wired to make connections between aesthetic elements, such as color and line, and ideas beyond the canvas.
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