Richard Stout: In Pursuit of the Sublime
The work of Houston artist, Richard Stout, inspires awe and mystery. Whether in painting or now-as revealed for the first time in this exhibition of recent work-in sculpture, his art delights the heart as well as enriches the mind. He has an incredible visual memory and looks at nature with a penetrating and discriminating eye. If he is depicting a place that he knows well such as East Galveston Bay, Guanajuato, Venice, or Berlin, he transforms the scene into a timeless image of radiant color and suffused light. If he deals with an interior-for example, a theater or home-he manipulates the perspective for dramatic effect and deliberately intensifies the color range. His visual memory is extraordinary and his imagination inexhaustible. While the principal subject of all his work remains atmosphere and light, the symbolic content of his work can never be ignored.
His new sculptures are done in bronze from hand-molded waxes. They are richly patinated in deep brown or dark green or delicately plated in silver, which makes them dissolve in light. They resemble ceremonial cups or ritual objects and consist of leaves, twigs, and corrugated paper. While they appear to have been assembled for no apparent purpose, their meaning is complex. A pair of vertical sculptures, for example, represent the warriors Paris and Achilles. Two containers, likewise, bear the titles Medusa's Cup and Helen's Vessel, respectively. A composition with fabric attached to a twig becomes a metaphor of a shipwreck, forming part of his Argonant series. Another small-scale arrangement of intertwined plant elements has the suggestive title, Abduction.
His paintings exhibit a similar range of concerns. In Torcello Lost, for example, it is not the picturesque island in the Venetian lagoon that the artist wants us to imagine but the feeling of desolation and decay that a visit to the remote sanctuary ringed with cypress trees engenders. Morning in Berlin, by the same token, captures the beauty of a veranda suffused in sunlight, but the true subject of the work is the euphoria, physically and emotionally, suggested by the dramatic shafts of bright light and the rich array of spring colors with which the artist evokes the place.
The artist's way of working is also relevant. Invariably he begins with charcoal, laying in the geometry of the composition and dividing the canvas into quadrants. He then adds paint to establish the desired effects of color and light. For example, in Hidden Voyage, he set out to do a dark picture. After creating the geometric structure of the design, he applied gray, blue, and green pigments to suggest space. He then contrasted these somber hues with the brilliant yellow in the foreground, which defines where the viewer stands. Thus, the overall picture becomes a passage from light to dark, from day to night, from the real world to the world of dreams.
In truth, there is no more sophisticated painter working in the Southwest. Inspired by Giacometti, Ernst and other Surrealist works on view at the nearby Menil Collection but possessing an understanding of the powers of landscape that is almost mystical, Richard Stout stands apart. He is an artist of our time, but through his works he transports us to places near and far, making us appreciate the world in fresh ways and bringing a set of emotions into our experience of daily life that, albeit clouded in mystery, is both reassuring and uplifting. He is a worthy successor to his Romantic forebearers, Turner and Delacroix, whose goal superceded any traditional concept of beauty in favor of effects that can only be described as Sublime.
Edmund P. Pillsbury, Ph.D.
