CONNERSMITH is pleased to present “Feed Your Demons,” an exhibition of new paintings by John Stark.

In each of Stark’s pictures a quiet respite is to be found. Flawlessly rendered in oils on wood, their poetics of color, form and texture immediately invoke Baroque still life masterpieces. Closer observation discloses them as radically contemporary meditations on reality. Drawing from Buddhist philosophy, anthropology, and comparative archeology, the artist conceptualizes the agency of natural forces within a subversive model of cultural history. Stark reimagines his genre as a social medium, deploying still life as a secure nexus between artist and viewer. He explains,

“Painting is a social space, a two-way mirror, where beholder and maker become one. I hope these works will open a hospitable place, a small window where truth and friendship coalesce, where our demons can feed and rest.”

Making art about reality, experiencing the essence of material objects, and feeling a real presence in stillness, center these works. Stark’s subjects - fresh fruit, vegetables, savory cheeses, wine, beer and rich meat – assume multiple levels of meaning. He imparts, “The metaphor of food consumption paralleled with ‘demons to be fed’ is a transformative one which correlates towards mental wellbeing.” Stark considers demons, not as minions of Satan, but, rather, as psychological challenges. He asserts, “Fears, insecurities, obsessions, addictions, are demonic parts of oneself that need to be battled against. If you don’t go to your demons, or worse try to flee, they will pursue you.” Here the artist evokes the Medieval Tibetan Buddhist monk Machig Labdron, who identified a demon as anything that obstructs the achievement of freedom. She advised, ‘With a loving mind, cherish more than a child, the hostile gods and demons of apparent existence, and tenderly surround yourself with them.”

The collective civilizing process, for Stark, is consonant with the individual process of self-realization. He points to Franz Baermann Steiner’s assertion that "What was once outside society, what was later inside society will, when this society triumphs, one day be within the individual. The process is the conquest of man by the natural forces, the demons. It is the march of danger into the heart of creation." Along this line of thought, Stark reflects, “My still life paintings, mostly of food, can be viewed as offerings, a kind of nectar for the demons. I have always thought my work as an inner process of moving towards a state of healing. Or as Carl Jung wrote about the process of individuation, advancing towards the self, a becoming.” He elaborates, “‘The natural forces’, such as dreams, the unconscious and imagination have been viewed in the past as dangerous or evil, but they are also the pure essence of creation. We all contain this potential, individually and collectively, it’s what connects us with every single breath, and it’s contained in every tiny brush stroke.”

With each brush stroke, too, Stark engages in a conversation with the history of painting. “The lemons I paint are materially continuous with lemons in works by Francisco de Zurbaran or Jan Davidsz. de Heem,” he states, “I also look to Clara Peeters, a fantastic painter of cheese and complex food arrangements. In Adriaen Coorte’s paintings I attend to scale, luminosity and light. Juan Sanchez Cotan shows me to regard objects as both familiar and alien. I admire his restraint and the austerity of the black voids surrounding the hyperreal fruit. I learn from them all and find my own path.” Stark’s individual style combines photorealist techniques with classical ones. He uses photography to fix the objects in space and light. The mirrorlike surfaces of his panels also refer to photography. He observes, “There is not much painterly gesture in my painting. As with Cotan, the expression occurs on a psychological level.”