Stan NARTEN - Demon Haunted World

Press release

Galerie Richard in Paris presents two personal exhibitions by Carl Fudge entitled Wadsworth and by Stan Narten entitled Demon Haunted World from May 12 to June 23, 2012. These two painters from New York are part of the generation of painters for whom the computer has replaced the sketchbook for the realization of the preparatory works and which thus widen their field of creativity. Carl Fudge and Stan Narten work from figurative images, most often works of art, and transform them by breaking them down and restructuring them into a new assembly between figuration and abstraction.

Born in 1979 in Sofia, Stan Narten lives and works in New York. It mixes the use of the digital process and classic painting techniques. For his first exhibition in Europe Stan Narten presents two series of works. Three paintings from 2009, very enigmatic, were inspired by films and television series. The eight other paintings were painted in 2011 and especially 2012. For the latter he starts from reproductions of paintings from different centuries which most often deal with religious or mythological themes. He deconstructs them, blurs their visibility to the point of showing a unique enigmatic work. The abstraction is mainly created by the use of carefully arranged pieces of the original image. Throughout this process, the original iconography is superimposed on the elements of the digital process and the suggestions of visual disturbances. Stan Narten does not make a new version of a Master painting. He is freely inspired by it, systematically reframes it, highlights certain elements, eliminates or brings together even more the major elements of the work. He puts the pieces of a puzzle together as he pleases. The size of the small formats is explained by the fact that he selected for these works a small part of the original work. The small paintings deserve special attention for this because of the very fact of their more distanced subject they become very beautiful abstract works. Stan Narten scrupulously reproduces a significant element of the original painting and can give pleasure to the Sherlock Homes of art history. However, his paintings are self-sufficient, just as it is not necessary to return to the places where the Impressionist painters painted to appreciate their landscape paintings.

In the tradition of the old masters, the paintings are laboriously constructed in multitudes of layers and accumulations of glazes with a depth and light that only the medium of oil paint is capable of rendering. Stan Narten plays with contrasts using current digital tools but at the same time returning to the great technique of oil painting applied finely layer after layer. The choice of Baroque painters dominates and this corresponds well to the nature of his own work, complex, which uses light to sculpt its models in chiaroscuro. We will notice the importance of the white spots in his paintings, which enhance the colors, energize the composition and amplify the contrast of lights. This visual innovation comes to him from a lack of vision which he takes advantage of today as a painter.

The nature of faith is a concept that fascinates him and the method of abstraction in his paintings reflects his vision of Man in the Universe. The artist plays with the innate tendency of man to read images from an anthropomorphic point of view so that however abstract his paintings can become, the human being retains this ability to find a figuration in them. For Stan Narten, this aesthetic in-between point between figuration and abstraction also defines the point that connects order and chaos, disillusion and faith. In this ambiguous zone of perception, Narten invokes the experience of reversing the familiar and the foreign, the known and the unknown.

Stan Narten exhibits regularly at the Kravets Wehby Gallery in New York. The Galerie Richard presented him in Paris in the exhibition The Incomplete-Paris in 2010, which brought together 28 young artists collected by Hubert Neumann.