"Realizations" by Samuel Stabler

About

VICTORI + MO is pleased to announce "Realizations," an exhibition of new work from Athens-based artist Samuel Stabler, opening March 24, 2017 and onview through April 23, 2017.

Expanding on Stabler’s “Old Masters” series of paintings, in which he recreated classical masterworks in highly detailed pen-and-ink drawings, obscuring the image with streaks of gray and neon yellow, "Realizations" provides a new way of looking at and experiencing painting.

"Realizations" consists of four main works: two “Cowboy” paintings, a sculptural “still life”, and a still life painting of the sculpture. The two larger gallery walls are covered in brightly colored stripedwallpaper, reminiscent of Stabler’s signature style that he applies to his "Cowboy paintings.” His “Cowboy paintings,” horizontal works inspired from Western film stills hang on the wallpaper to create continuous lines of color that are only disrupted by the frame around the canvas. In the middle of the room is a sculptural representation of a Dutch still life, a first for Stabler, painted in the style of his “Old Master” paintings, grey with bright highlighter color accents, which he creates from memory. A painting of the sculptural “still life” is hung directly behind it, functioning as a representation of an object inspired by painting.

As a product of the digital age, Stabler is concerned with the proliferation of information and images. His sources are easily recognizable in that one might not be able to name the painting or film, but can identify it as being made in the style of an Old Master or Western with modest art or film history knowlßedge. While ranging in art historical significance, his sources–whether it is a master painting in a museum or a classic cowboy movie–carry equivalent weight in Stabler’s visual vocabulary. His work repeatedly provokes the questions, "What is all this information I've obtained?” and “What is it good for?”

Extending the questions of appropriation, influence, and modernization, this ongoing series refracts traditional painting and modern cultural references through the prism of the digital age, where everything can be accessed at once. Reduced to their base composition of structural lines, grayscale palette, and bands of neon, these works address the torrents of information available at a whim and the worth and influence we personally assign to each. Everything is different, yet the same all at once.