Simon Stone

The work of some artists lends itself to the most fluid of critical conversations. It's almost as though every paint stroke and compositional angle has been so artfully preconceived, every material component so intricately choreographed and self-consciously conceptualised in terms of its inter-textuality and multiple references that to "not get it" is to admit to the most contemptible form of visual illiteracy and cultural philistinism. Simon Stone's work is not one of these. Coherent exegesis is not his strong suit and efforts at critical responses sometimes seem tantamount to imposing a linguistic grid on a dialect that defies verbiage. His is not an art that speaks for itself. It speaks to itself in codes
that is as inchoate as they are arcane.

There is something undeniably compulsive and singularly "other" not only about his persona but his paintings. And this statement is in itself, paradoxical, because Stone's images are instantly, sometimes mundanely familiar. It is of the cigarette stub, street sign, beer can, and boiled egg variety. They are the sights we glimpse through the rear-view mirror, through a partially closed curtain, or in a cluttered storeroom: a receding landscape, a clothes hanger, the delicate outline of a naked woman - coquettish, raw and erotic... rational figurative forms, rendered in entirely irrational spaces with a sense of startling, bizarre beauty, painted in variously muddy or glorious hues, sometimes as though by different hands... Whether it’s the thousands of sketches he has painted, on virtually a daily basis over the last 20 years or his insatiable lust for collecting fishing sinkers and imbuing them with jewel-like luminescence on canvas, they are the fragmented incarnations of an obsessive, unashamedly unholistic consciousness.

Text taken from "Stone Caves" article by Hazel Friedman