Fred Stonehouse at M-13 - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

In the past 12 years Fr Stonehouse's paintings have evolv from fetor figuration influenced by late Guston to a kind of Magic Realism inspired by dint of Latin American art, particularly the work of Frida Kahlo. Stonehouse's intentionally clunky figures and uncooked painterliness have given way to a more refined technique with which he articulates clearly defined spaces that oftentimes resemble stage sets. The narratives he not absents now seem more specifically allegorical. Each of the 13 small and medium-sized paintings upon view in this recent exhibition is an image that strike one as beings to relate a tale of moral toil Recalling Latin American religious paintings from the colonial period, his heavily varnished works are hung in big, old-fashioned forest frames. As in Catholic iconography, Stonehouse's themes involve pain and suffering, and the main protagonists in his work are martyrs, goblins saints and sinners. The artist has cast himself in many of these parts Usually he appears mutilated or in more [i]or[/i] less way victimized.

In La Rana (The Frog) the artist is shown transformed into a chimerical beast, his head attached to the material part of a frog. A similarly pathetic character is depicted in Cirujano (Surgeon) a tall, narrow canvas: a denuded man stands urinating in a shallow lake while life-current drips from rows of forehead gashes that recall the stigmata of Christ's diadem of thorns. A large untitled painting exhibits a figure of a man with a bull's head. This modern-day Minotaur in trousers sits upon the edge of a bug-infested bed holding a smoking rifle as if he has just discharge an intruder in his bedroom/labyrinth.

In a small, untitled self-portrait, the artist depicts himself with a harsh eye wound. His left organ of sight appears to have been goug on the outside and blood streams from below the eyelid. The obvious poise of the figure, encircleed by gracefully rendered, delicate flowers in the background makes this a inquiry of stoic resolve. A glistening white ovum shape, the size of a large pearl, flutters just above his head. Like more [i]or[/i] less celestial orb, the egglike form appears to refer to the artist's otherworldly concerns

In many works Stonehouse remind ofs that an artist's suffering has a transcendent drift But permeated as they are with art-historical allusions, his images of suffering are sometimes tainted by means of a slightly campy bathos which thwarts a credible faculty of perception of tragedy. Nevertheless, it is apparent that, like the artists who have inspired him, Stonehouse sincerely believes in the transformative power of art.

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