Justin Stephens

Update on hippies
01.13–02.26.2005
Room 2

Justin Stephens’ Update on Hippies brings together a series of paintings made in Montreal and Australia, where the artist has been staying since the summer of 2004. In his painting, Stephens explores the theme of landscape as a study of the sublime. His abstractions present indeterminate spaces in which diverse signs and symbols float and get tangled up. Stephens offers, in Update on Hippies, a kind of revision of modernist painting as it was conceived of by the abstract expressionist painters, for whom the quest for the sublime, as an experience of totality and the infinite, constituted the ultimate path for representing the drama of existence.

While claiming the same field of investigation, Stephens delivers a painting stripped of the character of spiritual gravity with which the work of his predecessors was impregnated. In fact, with Update on Hippies, the artist ironizes, with both humour and casualness, the modernist project of universality and the absolute by eliminating any ideological discourse from his research in favour of the deployment of spatial fields without drama or elevation, spiritual or moral aspirations and without the trace of any revolution. Following the caprices of hand and gesture, the various spots and signs that appear in the foreground of several of his abstract landscapes – veritable desacralised deserts – are deliberately treated like visual scraps, and, as put forward by Stephens, are related more to the abject than the sublime. Freed from all constraint, this painting that literally overflows the edges of the frame to attach itself to the walls, spill over the floor and invade a corner of the room, illustrates, with a lightness that has nothing to do with superficiality, the spirit of disaffection that characterizes our age.

NdeB

Translation by PduB