Suspensions: Jason Stopa's abstracted landscapes

I grew up in Southern California, and though I had friends who’d take seasonal vacations to mountains—to Big Bear, to Lake Tahoe—my family was never really the cabin dwelling type. I’ve never snowboarded; I have not ever skied. In this absence, “the slopes” have existed solely in my imagination, simultaneously magical and frightening to me, and probably the both because of their mystery; there’s a certain kind of appeal to uncertainty. 

I am not entirely sure what I’m looking at in Suspended (2010)—it’s not even a ski lift, perhaps it’s the tracing of a monorail, but I know that seeing the painting brings me to this place of haze. The scene is all shrouded, muted and blurred, and I'm asking where am I, exactly, in this landscape?

The question of locale is deliberately left unanswered in the paintings of Jason Stopa. A 28-year old artist based in New York City, Stopa turns to the landscape in order to depict what can’t fully be distinguished. While you can discern specific forms in his paintings—a monorail in Suspended, a boat’s bow in The Collection (Doomsday Seed Vault) (2010), the outline of a castle in Parade of Lights (2010)—a full grasp of the scene is an impossibility. While the vessel in The Collection appears to be floating in water, the boat’s surroundings don’t quite resemble the ocean. From further review of its title we learn the form isn't actually a boat at all, but a “seed vault” resting in ice, a storage receptacle that can be found in the Arctic.

The sources of Stopa’s paintings can be located just as I traced The Collection back to a National Geographic feature. And indeed, Stopa says that his paintings do derive from specific images he has happened across over time, such as a picture from a magazine, or a still from a film. But the specificity of these locations is diminished through Stopa’s painting process. Distinct landscapes are dimmed and the origins of the images become but an afterthought. Though we can identify the titular subject in Caterpillar (2010) it’s not exactly the insect that makes the painting so unsettling; but it’s the glowing, it’s the foggy wash of blue in which it hovers.

Landscape paintings are often considered precise depictions of reality, but for Stopa they also act as entrances into the imaginary. His image alterations are a means of approaching that which lies beneath the material realm, what he calls the “abstract elements of reality.” In choosing landscape painting in particular, Stopa finds that these “abstract elements” can be located in the everyday, that figurative art can too reflect the intangible.

And in remarkable ways. You wonder what world in which Caterpillar crawls, of what, in Parade of Lights, has been left unlit. I turn to Suspended, and though I can reason that this mechanism is in motion, and that it can work to bring these vehicles forward, I am not wholly certain of their arrival. There's a tension in their suspension, a just maybe coming to.

—Ashley James, Communications Intern