Medusa as a Self-Portrait:  John Stark’s landscapes

John Stark’s paintings are elusive. At first glance, they appear to us as ‘readable’, as a series of symbols with a meaning waiting to be deciphered. They seem to be a text. Behold! They are not! They are pictorial paradoxes that work both at the level of allegorical reading and also at that of the representation of the landscape as a reflection on things that are outside the picture and transcend the sphere of the symbolic. Its theme is friendship through painting as a practice and not as a strategy.

Bruno La Tour says that the difference between science and painting is that the former is a vehicle for transporting information and the latter is a vehicle for transporting people, for creating presence. The role of art is key as a site that points to something else outside of itself. John’s paintings point at him as an enunciator and at us as beholders. It does this against the canon of contemporary art that privileges –from the perspective of the art market- an easily digestible art that can be ‘understood or read’. In this scheme, a tree symbolises purity, a lake symbolises painting, a witch symbolises threatened femininity, and the list goes on and on. This is not art but media. Well, forget about all that because John Stark’s art thematises the deconstruction of this by transforming his paintings into shiny mirrors that are placed in front of you and place you in an intermediate world between artifice and reality where you can very easily get lost.

These paintings find their way between a series of oppositions such as city vs. nature; order vs. chaos, foreground vs. background, satire vs. pastoral, neutral colours vs. neon, and drama vs. metaphysics. His paintings are a disembodied representation of a micro cosmos that draws attention to itself but that, at the same time, pushes us away from it. They are repulsive in the best possible sense.  All this is surprisingly presented in the rhetoric’s of pastoralist painting. According to David Rosand, that kind of landscape is characterised by depicting an intimate space in a bigger one and it is always linked to civilization. They are wild but never too wild and they are isolated but never too far away from the community. In spite of the fact that this pastoral rhetoric denies pastoral impersonality, Stark’s backgrounds flirt with the panoramic view of the Netherlandish tradition of the world landscape of Altdorfer and Patinir. His work is an interplay of unfolding paradoxes. 

John’s landscapes are architectural. They are perfectly framed and there is always a tree or promontory that functions as repoussoir. There is also a classicising division between foreground, middle ground and background. The background and the overall composition are shockingly similar across his different paintings. However, if we look closely we can see their colours mutate and become increasingly artificial. Nature becomes metaphysical as not only the _expression of an idea but also as an allegory of a doomed world. As in Joachim Patinir or Pieter Brueghel, his ‘world landscape’ is a place of moral choices and revelations. Emptiness is a place of presence. Where there is nothing, there is everything. That is John Stark’s way of dealing with the world and it only takes two minutes of conversation with him to realise that his paintings are unashamedly self-referential, they are collective self-portraits. His simplicity is ridiculously serious and turns him into a representative of an irrational order taken to metaphysical heights. A man of his age, he tries to subvert beauty as a pictorial representation of a hope for a new beginning. 1

Moreover, John’s paintings are paintings about painting. They are a reflection on the ways of constructing value and identity as a painter in a world that privileges concept over execution. In this sense, he is a very good example of the generation of London artists that reacted against the conceptualism of the YBA generation. However, he does this through the scopic regime of mimetic idealism where attention is not drawn to the artist’s touch (as in Katy Moran, to give just an example) but he effaces himself but making his paintings perfect. His work blurs the relationship between inside and outside by drawing attention to the fact that they are perfect mirrors of a doomed world. John displays painterly virtuosity and creates value by turning his paintings into stages where in-significant actions take place. It is as if his figures are irrelevant and that is the whole point. They are part of the landscape: they are the frame of the true subject of the paintings. Stark is subverting the order of a tradition of painting according to which the landscape was just a ‘parergon’ (in Greek ‘out of the work’) of the action in the foreground. John’s paintings activate the unfolding of a series of different frames that reflect on its own status as an art object.

When the beholder first confronts these paintings, there is an attempt for finding meaning through symbols and allegories. We want to go through the surface and find meaning underneath it. But the key to these paintings is in their surface not in its depth. They are a flat space were the world is inscribed and they refuse to be taken as a text. The beholder finds himself in the position of a violator that wants to penetrate that immaculate surface and where the act of viewing is turned into a sexual metaphor of an impure kind. The moral choice is after all just an illusion that John uses in the unfolding of the reflection of the painting about itself.

The proliferation of witches and fallen women as symbols of syphilis, sickness, evil and repulsion reinforces this approach and takes us to the myth of the Medusa which transforms John Stark in a sort of Perseus that aims at controlling femininity and eventually beheads it. The Medusa in the tradition of the history of art has signified the ‘vagina dentata’ or the threatening insides of a woman which at the same time are our own insides. Perseus’ shield was the first portrait of a deathly woman.  Stark’s figures of disgusting women transform the painting into an anatomy lesson, into a place where the insides –impure- are being revealed. He turns the landscape into a taboo by pushing these scenes towards us as in a stage. However, the horror is mediated by a constant reference to the tradition of high art since many of these women can be found in the work of Hans Baldung Grien and Salvator Rosa, to give just two examples. Thus, his paintings are an _expression of the sublime because he places decay and death in a place of beauty, in the ‘locus amoenus’. But is this an earthly paradise or Hell? Is this a ‘locus horridus’ or a sacred space? Is this a version of a masculine Nature, infertile and barren?

There is a focus on the imperfections of the landscape but those imperfections are aestheticised and beautified. In this sense, his relation with the work of Salvator Rosa is more of a commentary than an irreflexive quotation. He is not an intertextual artist. He builds painting from scratch. His landscapes are delightful but dangerous, unwelcoming and rough. As a matter of fact, the foreground is always blocking our access to the landscape. Again, he takes the moral choice away from us. This is a doomed world at the highest possible level. A choking experience in spite of its extreme beauty. It is at this level that the painting turns on itself and works at two levels: the landscape is, as Nicolas of Cusa used to conceive it, a place of relaxation and of soothing experiences and, at the same time, it is a place of damnation through beauty. In the context of our culture where the saturation of images and ‘beauty’ suffocates us, this painting becomes a reflection on the status of the image in the Twenty First century by deploying the pictorial rhetoric’s of the Sixteenth.

The colours of the background changes from painting to painting and become increasingly artificial and ‘beautiful’.  It is difficult not to think of the chemical beauty of the contaminated waters of La Seine in the works of Seurat and Pisarro where the waters look idyllic but they are deadly poisonous. From this perspective, John Stark’s rivers and lakes are allegories of ecological catastrophes and why not, of global warming. The metaphysical becomes here extremely physical.

I find extremely interesting that John Stark is developing an interest in the work of Nicolas Poussin at the moment because I think both their preoccupations to create a pictorial language or, in other words, of transforming thought into painting, coincide. The question here is not about the idea that value is inside the artist head before painting (as in conceptualism) or in the quality of the execution (as in the Dutch painting) but in the transformation of the idea into a pictorial language through which nature and landscape will become ‘signs’ that can be intuitively (not rationally) decoded by the beholder. In other words, his witches and syphilitics are not symbols that mean anything but convey a mood that gives the ‘impression’ of what it tries to say. Therefore, his paintings are not texts to be read but images to be absorbed at a psychological level. From a certain point of view, his paintings could be understood as surrealistic. Meaning through sight in Stark constitutes a commentary on a visual culture that lost its capacity to creating presence and that has resigned itself to become a ‘work with a meaning’. His paintings are an escape from a cybernetic world in which everything is decodable. They are a social space where all interpretations are condensed and pressurised. If meaning is what you are looking for, feel free to play because John Stark has created a space for you to do so. His paintings are psychological playgrounds where if you attempt to find meaning you might go mad. However, don’t think that you are going to get anywhere or that you are going to find any truth because it doesn’t lie in the painting but in a symbiotic relationship between the artist and the beholder. As Cicero used to say: ‘when I look at my friends, I see myself’. John’s paintings create a ‘mirror’ which is his self portrait but where you can also see your own image. The act of viewing becomes a humanistic act of friendship in a world in which the only truth lies in that relationship. Friendship is a place where beauty and truth coalesce. The rest is just market.

Rodrigo Canete
Courtauld Institute of Art