Natives Opening: March 22, 2001, 7 p.m. Duration of exhibition: March 23 – April 28, 2001 The British painter Tim Stoner (b. 1970) has introduced the iconographic and stylistic paradigm of classical painting to the contemporary context of idealized genre painting. In his paintings, some of which are very large-scale, the beholder finds idyllic and nostalgic imagery reflecting diversion and harmony. Yet in spite of their seeming banality, they do not lose any of their emotional impact. A couple leaning out over the balcony, a family running towards the ocean, a dancing folkloric group whose folklore appears both formalized and uncanny – here it becomes evident that the notion of utopia has two faces and that structures that appear idyllic at first glance, such as the familly or the community, can be ambivalently situated between ardent solidarity and claustrophobic angst. "I'd like my paintings to be like sitting on a sunny beach while watching a video of 'Apocalypse Now'. At the end of that film you see these fantastic stills of palm trees and they just explode." Stoner has developed his own style of painting, using glazed layers of paint that produce very different color effects in his works. The bright glare of the representation against the light elevates his paintings to the level of timelessness, lending the figures a ghostly appearance so that while one can relate to them they are like faceless shadows. Stoner‘s paintings are thus figurative in the most straightforward sense of the word: his figures emerge like phantom-like silhouettes out of a world steeped in soft colors and diffuse light. In this sense the artist also alludes to the possibility of an ideal existence. "From the big-bang to the flash of the atomic age the representation of light runs deeply through collective memory. Primitive man described his daily rituals in silhouette and during the Middle Ages illustrators were called illuminators - often depicting saints crowned with halos. I want these images to hover between the secular and spiritual universe. The scale of these paintings quote the glamour of the holy image versus the earthly model of the descriptive eye, a reflected image of the universe in sunlight." Tim Stoner, born 1970 in Essex, studied at the Royal College of Art, London, and at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam. He lives and works in London where his paintings were shown last year in his first large one-person show "Cash if you die, cash if you don’t" at the approach. This spring Stoner will be taking part in the project "The Leisure Society" at the de Vlesshal which will be exploring the contemporary understanding of leisure time and its implications. As one of the finalists for the second "Beck´s Futures" art prize, he will also be showing work at the ICA in London.