Historically Accurate

Making pictures _work_ is rarely a challenge for Gary Stephan. Where he may labor is in the determination of how and where to "trim the fat." Carefully calibrating the intersection of formal reduction and amplified cognition, what's ultimately experienced is the discovery of a highly tuned pictorial instrument. Decisive geometries, muscular chromatic and value decisions and subtle surface densities mean that every part of each work has an important role in activating the whole. That aggregate has a function: to fully mobilize the dynamics of figure/ground and fact and fiction in painting. In his past work, one might find a baroque flourish or an elaborate apparatus used to fulfill his spatial systems; now the architecture is utterly lean, almost skeletal. The result is an enhanced charge of optical play that constantly forces a reevaluation of how and what one sees.