Martin Herbert

The Longer Route

In 1996, the comic-book writer Alan Moore published a novel, Voice of the Fire, which focuses on one patch of land in the author’s hometown of Northampton but stretches back from 4,000 BC and forward to the then-present day, entraining a sequence of episodic narratives that establish this subsection of English soil itself as a palimpsest, a hallow of diversely costumed ghosts. Wherever mankind has trod, the ground is a dense stack of histories, often violent and contentious. This, though, is arguably truer of some places than others, the bloodstains deeper and more commingled.

Consider the Spanish autonomous community of Andalusia. From the eighth century to the late fifteenth, following the Muslim defeat of the Visigoths and conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, it was under the rule of a succession of Arab and Berber caliphates and the scene of shifting cultural interchange between Muslims, Christians and Jews, as well as a number of civil wars with the northern territories. The area, which marked the westernmost point of the Islamic empire’s expansion into Europe, was known as Al-Andalus, and this era, the Reconquista, comprises one compound stratum in the timeline. Others, in the ensuing six centuries, would necessarily include the subsequent Spanish Inquisition, the Spanish Civil War and – coming up to date – our current polarised moment, with its pan-European demonisation of cultural otherness, exemplified in Spain by the far-right Vox party.

Now, class assignment: compress all of this encrusted turmoil convincingly into the medium of painting. Or don’t even bother to try, because I’d wager any artist – even a highly adept one – aiming to aesthetically transmute Andalusia’s chronicles will founder on the rocks of the illustrative, the this-means-that. That Tim Stoner’s paintings seemingly manage to touch the Andalusian earth, make an echo chamber for its voices without heavy-handedness or clangour, is a testimony to how artistic development and artistic persuasion work. That is: crabwise, stealthily, and from the subconscious.

In 2009, having spent the previous six years dividing his time between studios in East London and Andalusia, Stoner essentially relocated to the latter and began a phase of freeform technical experimentation, perhaps not wholly unrelated to the climate’s enabling his working partly outdoors. Painting, as traditionally understood, is primarily an additive act: paint goes on canvas, paint goes on paint, and while some of it might be scraped or wiped off during the process, it arrives in layers – inseparable from second

thoughts – and the final uppermost is what we see, traverse, absorb, interpret. Circa 2010, though, at one of those crossroads of stylistic restlessness that have speckled his career, Stoner went in the opposite direction. In Ronda, he began speculatively tossing unfinished canvases in swimming pools, pouring dissolving chemicals on their surfaces, and, decisively, assaulting them with palette knives and an operating room’s worth of scalpels, plus a range of sanding discs and wire brushes attached to drills.

Up to this point Stoner’s compositions had been anchored in choreographed figures, some taking years to coalesce, and typically expressed in complexly shimmering, glazed layers. As he worked back into unfinished paintings, only partly in control of his new tools, layers of underpainting chancily returned, art merging with archaeology, even vandalism. (Appropriately, he later discovered, Al-Andalus was not the Arab but the Vandal name for Spain.) As he did so, his art began to slip towards a type of abstraction that required the viewer’s roaming participation. While his paintings developed their motifs from a changeable array of drawings and small paintings that are built on a mix of close observation and invention, they were and are unpredictable and improvisatory journeys that, by the end, sit at a midpoint between represented subject and editorialising. Meanwhile, and while joining a shadowy lineage of artists who’ve created by taking away – from Rubens apocryphally buying a Titian painting and flaying it with a razor to see how it was made, to Bernini taking bronze from the roof of the Pantheon in order to make the baldachin in St Peter’s, to Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning – Stoner was sensing an asymmetry between form and content.

Put the cart before the horse. If these stylistic innovations were persuasive on a visual level, what might they lead him to think about? To some extent the answer was right beneath his feet – but also another factor was in play, which was an increasing desire to diminish the human figure in his art. (What began as a determination to change has, to hear the artist tell it, shifted in recent years into ambient frustration with humanity per se.) A figurative artist without figures, working in the midst of landscape, might find his subject through a process of exclusion. But Stoner also, it appears, doesn’t want to merely depict. In 1960, Willem de Kooning told David Sylvester that he wished his paintings to ‘have an emotion of a concrete experience’. Something of that deathless ambit, technique marshalled in the services of feeling-tone, condenses in paintings like Stoner’s Málaga Road (2016–19). The background is landscape, a tumble of trees, whitewashed dwellings and bleached grass, but it’s incised with a scratchy rollercoaster of lines that convey a ghostly ambiguous energy and topped with fragmentary, pinkish forms that, as per the title, seem related to reflections in a car windscreen. We’re in the modern vehicular present and the superficially unchanging landscape at once, accompanied by abstract elements that strain towards speaking of that which can’t be articulated, that is in some ways unspeakable.

Stoner’s paintings of recent years have looked towards not only the histories encoded in the locale but, in parallel, a succession of art histories, cross-splicing them. Pasts swim together here: his repeated attention to a single viewpoint, seen for example in Ronda (houses at the edge of town) (2016–19) has clear antecedents in the tenacious serial approaches of Impressionism and

Post-Impressionism, whose focus on light Stoner repurposed in his early paintings. Within this, though, there are rhythmically cavorting biomorphic forms in the guise of trees and clouds and gusts, a unifying pattern of raw engraving, and an oscillation between flatness and depth, wall and window. The subject matter has become a hook to hang a painting on, one that has created its own pictorial problems and eventual resolutions for maker and audience. In Al-Andalus (2016–18), a painting of a garden, the foreground appears to be a swaying stand of trees, though they recall the figure groupings Stoner used to paint and, equally, are as much of a grounding schema for an eyeball excursion as Pollock’s blue poles. As ever, you can start with one attribute – art-savvy all-over composition, glowing layers, firm draughtsmanship – and pivot to another, in this case Stoner’s deliberate exclusion of figures in reference to the absence of the human figure in Islamic art, and the concomitant reference to the Arabs’ apparent introduction to Spain of nature as pleasingly arranged optic experience rather than mere functional cultivation of agriculture.

Sefardí (2010–19) swings closest, here, to sheer objectless atmosphere. It’s a thrashing, vortex-like, vividly empurpled image that feels like a collision of phantasms – the overdeterminations of the Rococo, paciness of Futurism, and elegant snarl and velocity of De Kooning’s Pink Angels, plus maybe the sort of dust-cloud punctuated with flying fists that one used to see in comics. Somewhere within its decade of making are any number of earlier paintings, including one of Stoner’s sister on a swing, fragments of landscape, a range of abstract workouts and, over it all, the Andalusian landscape and the historical narrative of the expulsion of the Sephardic Jews from the region in 1492, and glinting reminders of medieval civilisation in the urban fabric. The twin movement in Stoner’s paintings, one might argue, is between burying something and disinterring it in the name of redemption. His canvases are literally built on historical errors: ironically, the artist has to make mistakes, or change his mind at least, in order to create something to dig into, to generate a rich loam for his spade. The redemption comes in visual interplay to which there are no shortcuts, and thus painting itself becomes a mode of knowledge and acceptance.

Self-knowledge, too. For here is another way in which Stoner’s paintings elude being ‘about’ the history of Andalusia (and the presumption that an Englishman might be able to limn that history better than a Spaniard): these are, equally and necessarily, paintings that reach back into the self. Stoner painted them in his 40s and the run-up to his 50th year, an age at which – this author’s experience suggests – one must take a hard look at oneself, accept that this is who you are and that in many ways you’re not going to change, learn to accept one’s faults and to live with doubt. There is a reading of these paintings, beyond geographic specifics, which says that imperfections are unavoidable and might even be leveraged by being put on display; the same for a certain abrasiveness and unease, which might be truer and riskier than self-protecting polish.

Inasmuch as Stoner paints between then and now, he also operates between here and there, recognising that one needs the other. On a practical level it appears that being able to leave a given canvas behind while working in a studio in another country helped him to see what was valuable about it; equally, his paintings over the last half-decade in particular reflect a movement between

countries and perhaps a sense, post-Brexit vote, of statelessness. This fluxing transpires on a local level too. Brockley, from 2015, is an interior of a café in South London at the other end of the journey from his East London studio, and marks a point where Stoner recognised that he could simply paint what was in front of him. Essex, a glimmering lemony landscape with receding figures from 2014, made atypically quickly, feels like a both a farewell to his former iconography of silhouetted figures and, in retrospect, a farewell to the UK as it was. Things as they are now are ghosted by things as they were and as they continue to inflect the present – not forgetting the slippery factor of historical knowledge – with the maker negotiating the melee of constant change and articulating that, somehow, ‘twas ever thus.

Consider Pueblo Flamenco (2016–19), a flashback to the modernist tradition of replicating sound and dance through art which swoops the eye through all manner of looping and jagged forms. Greenery, trees and blocky buildings anchor the canvas in landscape but it’s as much evocation as depiction, and Stoner’s avowed filter here is the profound vitalising imprint on the dynamic Andalusian character of the vigorous gitano (or Roma) culture, with its own entangled Muslim and Jewish influences. Such polyglot subject matter is, clearly, indivisible from our current antagonistic moment within Europe, and outside of it too. Pueblo Flamenco thus functions on nested scales: the artist, region, continent and beyond. It won’t be delimited by any of those prisms but perpetually slides into the next; nor will it be decoded by narrativising. A painting that restricts itself to telling a story is generally a bad one. At some point the thing must attain frictional life, maybe through a penumbra of interacting accidents; be wrestled with, generate the means to ensnare the viewer and hitch looking to thinking. Equally, a painter who begins with a story and then picks up their brushes is usually on a hiding to nothing. Painting comes first, while any subject matter ought to reveal itself in time, know its place, cede to others. It’s the longer route, but worth it.