CATALOGUE ESSAYS

Jason Stopa: Out of the Abyss

By Raphael Rubinstein

I’m tempted, I must admit, to embed an essay within this essay, just as Jason Stopa embeds paintings of paintings within his paintings. If I were to pursue this strategy, what sort of essay would be most suitable to insert into these pages? I guess it would have to be an essay about essays, or, more specifically, an essay about exhibition catalogue essays. I’m not sure anyone would want to read such an essay. I’m not even sure that I would want to ready such an essay. That’s quite opposite the case with Stopa’s paintings-of-paintings-within-paintings like those visible in The Gate or A Portrait of Luis Barragán. I’m only too happy to look again and again at these inserted compositions and to let myself be engaged by their spirited riffs on various modes of abstraction. 

A common term for such pictures within pictures is mise-en-abyme. Borrowed from the field of heraldry where it refers to a shield design that incorporates the picture of a smaller shield within itself, the concept of mise-en-abyme (literally, to place in an abyss) was taken up in the 1970s by postmodern philosophers (most notably Jacques Derrida), yet the first person to apply it to something other than heraldry appears to have been the French novelist André Gide. In the 1893 journal entry where he refers to the heraldic term he wrote: “In a work of art, I rather like to find thus transposed, at the level of the characters, the subject of the work itself. Nothing sheds more light on the work or displays the proportions of the whole work more accurately.”  While originally referencing paintings in which mirrors reflect parts of the depicted scenes (he cites Memling and Velasquez’s Las Meninas), Gide borrowed this device (to use another heraldic term) for his own writing. In his novel The Counterfeiters (1925), the narrator is writing a novel titled The Counterfeiters, thus setting up a complex interplay that renders all the more forceful Gide’s interrogation of the fake and the authentic, whether embodied in a coin or in a person.

So, how should we read the motifs in Stopa’s nested pictures? Are they caricatures or cynical imitations of some canonical abstract painter? Should we locate them in a history of meta-painting that begins with Sigmar Polke’s Moderne Kunst (1968)? Or are they something quite different, more like a celebration of the richness of abstraction? From my perspective, there seems to be little or no cynicism in Stopa’s work. Any self-referentiality or art-historical allusions are there only at the service of painting and not to undermine its authority. This abyssal gestural isn’t the start of a vicious circle but, like all other devices Stopa uses, an invitation the joyful visuality. I think it’s no accident that the word “joy” shows up in the titles of two of his recent paintings, The Sound of Joy and Joy Labyrinth. (Stopa is one of a number of contemporary painters such as Franklin Evans, Kerri Scharlin and Loren Munk who are not afraid to foreground a playful dialogue with the past, present and future of their medium.)

But these are not just paintings about painting. It is surely no accident that in a time of lockdowns and social distancing and strangely empty streets and public buildings an artist would turn to the subject of architecture. So it seems to be with Stopa. While architecture is not an entirely new concern of his, it has taken on a greater centrality, often with social overtones. The painting Drop City evokes the eponymous countercultural community established in Colorado in the 1960s, known for, among other things, its outrageous variations on Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes. A Portrait of Luis Barragán refers to the great Mexican architect whose buildings are structured around large planes of bold colors. Architecture and music are simultaneously summoned in Dream House for La Monte Young—one of the new paintings where Stopa fills a painting’s quadrants with swathes of bright colors. 

In these, as in all of Stopa’s work, there is a marvelous balance between deliberative shape-making and casual-looking brushwork, a combination that recalls, among other examples, Kimber Smith’s work of the 1970s, Shirley Jaffe’s late gouaches, and paintings by Patricia Treib. As with each of these artists, it’s not immediately evident looking at Stopa’s work what was on the artist’s mind when he was making a painting. Despite hints given in the titles and the art-historical allusions, we as viewers are essentially left on our own to choose from an infinitude of pathways into the painting and around it. As to why this freedom matters, I can do no better than quote from something Stopa himself wrote in 2019: “Our current cultural moment is incredibly polarized, which has given new life to artists working with direct, representational content. Yet, in this age of easily digestible sound-bites, graphic representations, and categorization, to paint in a way that creates space for imaginative possibility, indeterminacy, and restraint is in of itself a radical act.”*

* Statement for “New Skin,” an exhibition Stopa curated in late 2019 at Monica King Projects, New York.