Tower

Silhouetted and brightly backlit, a gymnastic group of six men tower in totem-like formation. They and the forested background, which seems to indicate a tropical locale, are painted in uniform tones of olive green offset by striking halos of pink outline: in this large-scale work, form is picked out against white in a bright graphic style reminiscent of woodcut or comic-book. The men’s costume is curiously dated, resembling the gear of pirates or 16th century conquistadors. Stoner, who is interested in ideas of utopia and the illusions of perfect happiness in a society of commercialised leisure, infuses his scenes with a brilliance that verges on painful, casting much into deliberate shadow. Perhaps these men are celebrating a newfound island paradise – but they and their setting are made faceless, joy and terror indistinguishable in the glaring sun. ‘The idea,’ he says, ‘came about after seeing an exhibition of Goya in a print museum in Marbella, which usually shows really bad art. They had the Tragedy of War series and the Bull Fights and I remember leaving this museum in a deluge of rain, thinking; how could you make art that profound, that brutal, that tragic, with that amount of pathos, while living in Marbella, in wonderful weather, surrounded by beautiful bodies and eating fantastic food? The contradiction between really that profound, emotionally messy art and those idyllic surroundings made me want to put these two things together in a painting.’