Painting as a social idea about abstraction.
Over the past decade Jason Stopa emerged as one of our most insightful critics of contemporary art in the New York tradition of painters who write. In his new exhibition, Garden of Music, at Diane Rosenstein in Los Angeles, Stopa wrestles with the history of abstraction, mining the forms of utopian architecture for his colorful abstractions that fuse geometric structure with brushy, almost casual, execution.
—Jarrett Earnest
Jarrett Earnest
The surfaces of your paintings are insistent on the ways that they’ve been touched. In the precise way that you’ve painted them, I feel as if your paintings are performing their presence as an object. I wonder how that relates to the function you see for abstraction right now.
Jason Stopa
I think touch is so important. I tell my students that the meaning of a painting is not only found in content alone but in how you use the paint. I want my touch to feel considered but casual, confident and a bit offhanded. I want the surface to read as wet, like Ancient Greek pottery. I’m not interested in labor being performed as a sign of “hard work.” That has always struck me as puritanical. If the field of the canvas is an arena of activity, then painting is a performative space.
I’m interested in how an abstract painting can reconstitute something from the past—acknowledging its context and history—so that it can argue for its relevancy today. There are a few ways I try to deal with this condition. For instance, I think a lot about color “families.” My color isn’t arbitrary; it’s color that’s rooted in early Henri Matisse, Bob Thompson, Stanley Whitney, Mary Heilmann. It’s graphic, optimistic color loaded with content about mythologies, Arcadia, and joy. To use that palette is to reference that content. When I think about an artist’s form and color I think: Where’s the context for it? What history is it trying to reference? How’s it going to perform its relationship to this in the present?
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Read the full interview at bombmagazine.org.
