When the artist Adam Stoner greeted me at Grove Gallery on the occasion of his current exhibition, he mentioned he was a scenic painter by training and trade. Which surprised me a little. Not because his art contradicted this backstory, but because I didn’t know Milwaukee had many, or any, scenic painters. Stoner added that he was indeed one of a very few, but that the craft was of a piece with his studio practice. But it all made sense very quickly; and Stoner’s love of scenery, color, form, and the history of painting became its own backdrop to a glorious ride through a painter’s pursuit of meaning.
Stoner’s exhibition “Your House is Your Larger Body,” up through August 2, tips its hand to scenic painting right from the window onto Fifth Street. There, a ladder wrapped in rope and fabric poses conspicuously. These are the tools of one of Stoner’s trades, and they happen to pop up again and again in the exhibition. This particular vocabulary of source interests, his palette of suggestive ochre and putty-colored architecture, and love of abandoned, rampart-filled towns, sends his work back in time. The 24 x 18 inch painting The Healing of Palladia has a title to match its proto-renaissance architectural inclinations. In the painting, finished with all the precision of the Arena Chapel frescoes, a foregrounded archway marks the entrance to a building complex. The plain, buff-titanium structure jogs back along a foreshortened wall and opens up across the painting. This deeper connecting wall of the building features only a squared off doorway and a clerestory window. It’s a suggestively simple set up.
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The whole scene would be as bleak as a Giorgio De Chirico, except for a mysterious, nearly-but-not-quite-opaque three-dimensional form snaking across the foreground intrusively. The occlusion takes the work into the strangest territory between supernatural and purely formal; forces moving in opposite directions. This nifty ambivalence is at the heart of all Stoner’s work, which enjoys the foundational history of the craft of painting as well as the flattening of the Modern composition. Perhaps this is why blocky pared-down architecture features so prominently, a perfect bridge between the clunky simplicity of walled medieval cities and the steel and concrete geometry of the contemporary world.
Body and Mind
The show’s title tells us something else about Stoner’s work. The simple structures that populate his canvases are also metaphors for the body and the mind. Once one considers this, his work begins to read like simplified didactic diagrams of mental states: confusion, possession, control, etc. Stacks of ladders that might have been tools or props become ladders between states of consciousness and dimensions of thought. At its maximal best, like in the large painting George and the Dragon featuring yet another abstract snaking form being lashed by two mysterious figures on ladders, the story gets very odd and very exciting very quickly. The lack of specificity sends the work into the plaguey past or the apocalyptic future with Stoner’s masterful craft keeping it all luscious and suggestive like a prime Fra Angelico or an action scene from “Fury Road.”
The exhibition offers some supplemental experiments to accompany the oil paint, like a stop-motion video of a sand painting, some wonderful charcoal drawings, and of course, the sculptural configuration in the window. However, Stoner is a painter first and last. Whether it’s on a muslin backdrop or on a wood panel, one senses his deep investment in the history and materiality of his medium. And like only the best painters can, Stoner himself then becomes the final medium, effortlessly linking his brushy, oily, glazey imagination with the world beyond.
Event Listings: July 28-August 3
Milwaukee Art Museum
- Drop-In Art Making: Kohl’s Art Studio
- Sunday, July 28, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.
Milwaukee Public Library East Branch
- Art for All
- Monday, July 29, 5:30–7:30 p.m.
Art Bar Milwaukee
- Write and View
- Tuesday, July 30, 5:30–8 p.m.
Milwaukee Art Museum
- Drop-In Tours: Architecture and Collection Highlights
- Sunday, July 28, 2–3 p.m.
Tooth and Nail Studio and Gallery
- Experimenting With Drawing: Portals With Ellie Braun
- Sunday, July 28, 12–3 p.m.
Villa Terrace Decorative Art Museum
- Work from Home Wednesday
- Wednesday, July 31, 12– 3 p.m.
Villa Terrace Decorative Art Museum
- Guided Tour of Villa
- Wednesday, July 31, 3–4 p.m.
Jewish Museum Milwaukee
- Forged Identities or Where’s the Art and What’s the Deal in Nikolai Gogol’s “Dead Souls”?
- Wednesday, July 31, 7–8:15 p.m.
Milwaukee Art Museum
- Thursday Nights at MAM
- Thursday, August 1, 4–8 p.m.
Kohler Arts Center at City Green (710 New York Avenue, Sheboygan)
- Levitt AMP: Lone Piñon (Art making activities, food, and music)
- Thursday, August 1, 6–8:30 p.m.
Milwaukee Art Museum
- Drop-In Art Making: Kohl’s Art Studio
- Saturday, August 3, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.
Wauwatosa Historical Society
- 38th Annual Firefly Art Fair
- Saturday, August 3, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.
Milwaukee Art Museum
- Story Time in the Galleries
- Saturday, August 3, 10:30–11 a.m.
Summerfest Grounds
- Black Arts Fest MKE
- Saturday, August 3, 12–10 p.m.
Milwaukee Art Museum
- Drop-In Tours: Architecture and Collection Highlights
- Saturday, August 3, 2 p.m.–3 p.m.
Museum of Wisconsin Art (MOWA)
- Opening Party: Weaving a Legacy: Ho-Chunk Black Ash Basketry
- Saturday, August 3, 2–4 p.m.
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Museum of Wisconsin Art (MOWA)
- Opening Party: Mirrors, Not Windows: Photographs by Asher Imtiaz
- Saturday, August 3, 2–4 p.m.
