Press Release - "Making A Space" by Ethan Stuart
Ethan Stuart
”Arrangement Builder”
Acrylic on canvas
72 x 84 inches
2021
pt. 2:
Making A Space
Ethan Stuart
Opening - March 13, 2021
Showing Through - Friday, April 2, 2021
Schedule a private viewing
info@part2gallery.com
pt. 2 Gallery is pleased to present Making a Space, a solo exhibition of new work by the Frenchtown, New Jersey-based painter Ethan Stuart. Stuart’s paintings detail a simultaneous narrative and emotional reaction to the narrative. Many of Stuart’s paintings depict frogs and tools, representative of different elements of the artist’s persona. Through this imagery, Stuart seeks to understand his past, present, and future - encountering nostalgia, time, and beauty along the way.
Stuart’s paintings are defined by a delicate surface, matte colors portray multiple objects, figures, and horizon points on a flattened picture plane. Paintings of inanimate objects such as tools, clocks, keys, and scissors, or living creatures such as frogs present dazzling perspective shifts in which the subject and background meld into the same plane. The lack of realistic space portrays the complexity of the artist’s narrative, oftentimes Stuart’s paintings use both image and palette to portray not just a memory or moment in time, but an emotional response to such time.
The varying reds, greens and blue tones across Stuart’s paintings reveal his recognition that the tools he paints are objects of not just creation but of destruction. In a small painting, a red hammer nearly fades into a pink and red background. The title To Put It Together, To Take It Apart alludes to the cyclical process that the artist participates in. In the large painting Arrangement Builder, a pair of scissors and a hammer rest amongst a variety of raw materials. Rendered mostly in emerald green, the piece teems with the possibility of what can be made. Yet the painting Building/Arranging alludes to the destruction inherent in this possibility, the green figure wields their tools above a space red with dismay. The scissors and botanical trimmings point to Stuart’s mother, who was a florist. The artist recalls both fascination with the beauty of her arrangements, and shock at the scissor’s scaring effect.
Ethan Stuart
”Sculpture Of A Flower Arrangement Composed By A Frog”
Acrylic on canvas
16 x 12 inches
2021
In the painting Time hoarding horologist, the artist crams a dozen clocks into the picture plane, the yellow and blue timepieces squeeze beyond their accustomed circular form, each reading a different time. A human-like frog adjusts one of the clocks, while a key rests just out of its reach. While the figure may not be recognizable as human, its contorted form appears nonetheless familiar as it grasps to wrangle time. The overwhelming array of clocks mark the degree to which time’s relativity has escaped many, as the days blend into one yet the hours drag by.
There is nonetheless, an overarching sense of optimism concurrent through Stuart’s paintings. The titular piece, Making a Space portrays a yellow with a paintbrush in one hand, a drill in the other. Each hand seems to sprout a secondary hand, suggesting an extraordinary amount of agency in the autobiographical figure’s ability to take control of its surroundings and thus its life. Though the scene depicted in the painting concentrates on physical space, the series as a whole alludes to Making a Space not just in a sense of physicality, but for emotional growth, ambition, and fulfillment.
Ethan John Stuart (b.1989, Owego, NY) is a painter based in Frenchtown NJ. His enigmatic paintings feature a fictional hyper evolving humanoid frog species that mirrors human behavior. Stuart attended Pratt Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In Chicago, he began to take influence by the playfulness and image construction of the Chicago Imagists. Stuart attended the artist residency at Vermont Studio Center in 2019. His work has been exhibited at pt. 2 Gallery Los Angeles and Projects Brookylyn, NY in 2020 and at False Cast, San Diego in 2021.