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Greg Stone at Pierogi - New York - exhibition of the artist's work
Art in America, Jan, 2004 by Gregory Volk
This was a breakthrough exhibition for painter Greg Stone, who has long been a mainstay of the thriving arts community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Stone's signature materials are oozing, sticky tar and paper applied to wood panels or museum board, with the tar, in particular, conjuring construction sites, city streets in the hottest summer and a milieu of urban grit. Exactly what Stone does with these materials remains a closely guarded secret. Suffice it to say that his exacting process, whatever it is, yields usually dazzling brown-and-white abstract works chock-full of intricate, mind-bending patterns that take shape on a cusp between exquisite order and frightful disarray. While entirely abstract, these patterns call up innumerable associations, bringing to mind everything from cosmic events, cellular structures, capillaries and synapses, to snippets of language and fragments of Islamic architectural ornamentation. Moreover, while Stone's intricate works evoke jangled nerves and potentially sinister machinations, they also possess a meditative, even religious quality, as if complex mysteries were embedded in the images, more available to the eyes and the instincts than to the rational mind.
The showstopper here was the largish (78-by-60-inch) Prayer (2003), featuring hints of American flags. In fact, Stone rendered four American flags, but twisting, turning and morphing them to form his version of a mandala. Whiplashing white squiggles and curlicues course around and through an underlying pattern of vertical bands. Some sections of the work resemble burlap scrutinized through a microscope; others have the freewheeling exaltation of ecstatic psychological (or hallucinogenic) flights. As stars and stripes fray, fissure and veer into startling new conditions, Prayer also encapsulates a nerve-racking time when American dread is mixed with a wavering hopefulness.
Stone's modest exhibition of nine works in various sizes revealed the range of his unorthodox esthetic. With a welter of slightly off-kilter diamond shapes, hundreds of tiny brown blobs and hints of fiery suns at the borders, Separated at Death (2002) is a reeling amalgamation of scientific (think X-rays, or microbes in a petri dish), spiritual and psychedelic imagery, with ample doses of Op art. In End of Conversation (2003), a pattern of vertical bands interacts with a dense, hovering circular form near the middle and thin circles radiating outward. There is a peculiar 3-D effect, as if the myriad white forms were protruding, even growing, outward from the panel. This is also one of many instances when Stone scrambles the viewer's perspective. You could be looking at some organic structure through a microscope, but also looking down on some mysterious earthly entity from a satellite's orbit. Stone's alchemical transformation of tar into eye-catching, richly evocative paintings is thoroughly convincing.
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