NYAB Event - Robert Stuart "Light"

Robert Stuart "Light"

RYAN LEE

This event has ended.

Mary Ryan Gallery presents Light, Robert Stuart's first solo exhibition at the gallery and in New York. Working meticulously, Stuart layers oils, wax, and metallic pigment to create paintings that are rich in depth, yet eerily luminous. Their surfaces seem to radiate light from within, conveying a sense of calm and boundless mystery. "Stuart masterfully takes oil paint through all of its capacities for opacity, translucency, transparency, soft edge, hard edge, impasto, and ephemeral," says Marcus A. Vincent, director of the Woodbury Art Museum.

Originally a representational painter, Stuart arrived at his distinct abstract style over the last ten years. He is often inspired by nature or encounters in his surroundings like, "dark rust stains on an ochre cement wall, crevices on a sidewalk, silver-red metal roofs, or the red-orange of temple columns in Japan." Stuart tries to evoke a sense of light "breaking through" in his works. He describes a particular experience with light that corresponded to the feelings he wanted his work to elicit: "...I was walking in the loft space of our big, old barn. Early morning sunlight was flooding the interior below. As I glanced down, the light was bursting through thin slits between the floor boards making brilliant crevices of light-a metaphor perhaps, for some sort of transcendent, otherworldly awakening."

Beginning with a small sketch, Stuart plans the composition of each painting with colors in mind. He then transfers the composition to a canvas using charcoal and tape to "preserve" the shape of the bands, and begins the layering of oil paint and wax medium, wiping and rubbing in between. In order to maintain the integrity of his lines, Stuart uses rolls of paper from adding machines in addition to palette knives and metal scrappers. While his arrangements of linear bars on canvas may seem simple at first glance, precision is paramount in these complex works.

The layering of paint and wax over the vertical bands makes them appear softly haloed, creating an oscillating effect against the monochromatic background. In addition to their internal luminosity, the paintings' unique surfaces reflect ambient light, affecting the intensity of a painting's glow depending on the level of light and the position of the viewer. The reduced geometric motifs, spare color, and stillness of Stuart's work recall minimalism, and the soft light emitted from each work conjures the fluorescent sculptures of Dan Flavin.

[Image: Robert Stuart "Winter Leaf" (2008) Oil and wax medium on canvas, 60 x 84 in.]