The palette is fine-tuned. This concertedly intensive aesthetic is not an arbitrary mode of presentation. Studded with opaque paraphrases of historical styles, his paintings imply an elongated sense of time which, rather than counteracting the flashy and momentary nature of his images, encourages one to consider how visual conventions filter down through history. One might also consider how leisure has moved from seeming like a human right to a form of cattle herding upon which whole economies depend. But the paintings' effect is not straightforwardly world-weary.
Pleasure is an element.
The effect of Stoner's work is not merely critical, for his transformation through paint of his subjects, and his sly allusions to the paintings of the past, make for canvases that are seductive and irreducible in their own terms. While Stoner analyses the nature of collective fantasy, he also wishes to make images of leisure and pleasure that genuinely communicate happiness, the better to expose the shallow, cookie-cutter representations that we are fed in everyday life. Also important is the fact that Stoner is, in the best sense of the phrase, a greedy painter. He engages in his work with a wide range of cultural experience - not just through the painterly referentiality that hums beneath the surface of his paintings, but also in referencing a variety of locations and historical periods. In Stoner's hands, however, these subjects have an undercurrent of strangeness, whether because he has reworked a group of figures so that they appear to be wearing miniature churches on their heads, or because they seem trapped in the past.