Artist Statement
I am a figure painter whose work is an intersection between the genealogy of symbolic cultural artifacts and a subtext of class politics regarding representation in the European derived tradition I come from. Over the past two decades, both of these conversations have been materializing and converging upon one another. My models are all personal acquaintances, and I endeavor to interface what I project onto them with their own aspirations. I approach them with a seed of an idea, but this idea never leaves them unchanged- often radically so.
The stories I tell are old- initially gods and goddesses, more recently historical themes of loss and defiance. Either way, the big idea needs to articulate itself through the person I’m depicting, and the collection of symbolic objects before them. Some objects are exactly what they seem. Some are exactly the opposite. Some… are a secret third thing? In the end they collaborate to tell us the story they are telling… but also to tell us that culture is never static.
Many years ago there was an apple that I knew could not remain an apple, because if it remained an apple the painting would be dead. We all know the apple and there is no room for new ideas within it. Not in the West. So the apple became a pepper. A New World plant with the same size, color variation, and approximate shape as the apple- but without the Judeo-Christian baggage. Sometimes, the apple is a pomegranate- which was at one time also the fruit of Genesis… before the apple became established as its stock image. I think it’s a better fruit of knowledge: glistening with an interior world of alizarin math. Lust.
This is one of the symbolic metanarratives present throughout my work- perhaps the most recurrent one. It shares a personal vocabulary with a plethora of musical instruments, animal skeletons, flying things, glassware, and other miscellaneous cultural detritus /personal objects. All of them mean what they mean in the outside world- your world--- but all of which have also been reacting with one another in my macro-narrative. This allows them to tell new stories… or at least stories with the potential for new endings?
To more explicitly frame the elements in my stories, I remove all the background imagery from my pictures. Initially this was done with exposed metal surfaces, but more often I now employ flat white backgrounds to generate a space of maximized visual clarity. The metal paintings offer a shifting world of alternating depth and flatness, evoking the spiritual realm of religious icon painting. The White offers me a clinical world through which I can exercise greater control, through which all compositions become possible. An analytical, academic setting.
I’m not academically trained, and it should be said- my painting process is meticulous and… slow. There are efficient ways to depict the human face, but there is baggage I can only introduce by working things until they breath. It’s important, because I’m not painting kings. I’m painting in a tradition that once reserved itself for these gods and kings… but the only people I know are people. Normal, working-class people. With minds full of dreams as colorful and varied as those I have the means to articulate. Rich interior worlds that often suffocate under 9 to 5s that are steadily becoming 8 to 6s… 7s even. More hours in both directions. As our society becomes increasingly hostile to the people I paint, it becomes increasingly important to me that my paintings of them stand on a scale with those made for people who could have afforded this luxury a hundred or more years ago.
Bio
James Stamboni was born in Mount Kisco, NY. He graduated with his BFA from SUNY New Paltz before getting certified to teach art in New York State’s public schools. In 2016, he was poisoned by a fluoroquinolone antibiotic. The associated connective tissue damage would cost him the ability to walk on hard surfaces without the use of leg braces, as well as the ability to work as an educator in a public setting. Over the following six years, complications from this iatrogenic chronic illness nearly took his life on three occasions, before a combination of experimental treatments stabilized him enough that he could his apartment and begin painting again.
He currently lives in Lower Westchester, where he splits his time between commissioned portraiture and large scale figurative works. Autism allows him to replicate most things he sees in two dimensions, and to retain pretty much any information that kindles his interest. You are encouraged to talk to him about jazz, or most other music.
