The worn intensity of her facial expression and the palpable weight of her flesh, rendered in Freud's visceral and fluid crosshatched line, give a distinct sense of pathos to his vision of the nude. This recent work leaves off from where the exhibit started, in asking where we are headed using the tradition of the nude to reflect the human condition. In the past, Fred Stonehouse has cribbed formal elements of Old Master art, Haitian painting and traditional Mexican iconography. Many of the works look like the sort of naive advertisements you might see, faded and dull, on the sides of buildings in an old part of town. It all adds up, as they say, and Stonehouse is the consummate mathematician.
Texts fade and are scratched away.
The paintings' surfaces are subtle and intricate, with cracks in the varnish, spatters like mud, a film of grime. They are careworn. With their flaws and wear-marks, the paintings, despite their ambiguous content, are all too human. The larger works have blocks of color on their surfaces, negative space that frames the images. Stonehouse's paintings are palimpsests from a nearly forgotten popular culture, hinting at unrevealed depths of feeling and making visible the way that personal, artistic and cultural history is made of layer upon layer of the sediment of experience settling on top of itself.