Nino Mier Gallery is proud to present The Good Land, an exhibition of paintings by California-based artist Jansson Stegner. The exhibition, on view from April 2 – May 7, 2022 in Los Angeles, will feature a suite of new portraits produced over the course of the past year. The gallery will publish a catalogue to accompany The Good Land featuring essays by writer Arty Nelson and curator Ali Subotnick.
The Good Land distills various moments from what many would identify as “the good life.” He bathes his subjects in dramatic, theatrical light as they pick oranges in a bucolic field, lounge on a rock in shallow waters, and stand in the shade of a bush lily plant. And yet something is awry in each work. Stegner’s oil paintings, categorized by the artist as “Weird Figuration,” reinvigorate the late Renaissance project of Mannerism, which imbued a sense of unreality into otherwise naturalistic portraiture. Mannerist paintings are characterized by their subjects’ serpentine poses, elongated anatomies, and saturated color palettes that prefigured the dramatic chiaroscuro light of Baroque art. In Stegner’s portraiture, the figure again is freed from the constrictions of realism. His subjects are creatures whose body parts are out of joint, who have elongated, slender torsos that connect to exaggeratedly muscular limbs and support heads the size of their elbows. The more hyperbolic expressions of musculature and power are saved for his female subjects, while his men tend to be slighter and more pensive.
Stegner’s paintings reimagine the customs of gender expression in early modern portraiture not just through his representations of body parts, but also through their immersion in scenes. The Birdwatchers, for instance, depicts two broad-shouldered yet slender men sitting in a clearing under an aqua blue sky. The color palette and composition of the painting draw strong connections to Raphael’s Alba Madonna, which depicts Mary lounging with a young Jesus and St. John the Baptist. While the religious references do not carry into Stegner’s painting, the feminine mise-en-scene does. Alternatively, Lifeguard centers a woman lounging on a large, pointed rock beneath a forebodingly dark sky. The composition trains our eyes on her supremely muscular legs, imbuing her character with a sense of power over nature, a struggle usually fought (and lost) by men in Romantic painting.
One of the most pronouncedly contemporary features of Stegner’s portraiture is his subjects’ clothing, which produce a productive tension with his style. Works such as Along El Sueño Road bring to mind the conventions of contemporary fashion photography. The subject’s short, lacy dress and her coy yet commanding expression seem fit for an editorial yet are masterfully rendered here with rich oil paints. The most common functions of quasi-naturalistic portraiture have shifted in recent decades. What was once a genre deployed either to connote an historic individual’s prowess or to explore grander themes of nature and religion, now is most often viewed for its commercial potential. Stegner’s paintings collapse the visual markers of this gap, immersing viewers in a beautifully strange “good land” that feels out of step with the march of history.
One of the main questions posed by The Good Land is what place such a distorting formal repertoire has in contemporary figurative painting. Historians have come to understand the Mannerist pictorial language as reacting to cracks in the religious, social, and cosmological order of 16th century Europe. The popular artistic emphasis on equilibrium and rationality best expressed by Da Vinci’s Vesuvian Man began to disintegrate, melting into a slew of long, misshapen limbs under the Copernican sun. Stegner’s paintings in The Good Land, too, register some of the many instabilities of today’s world—the stability of the gendered body, the truth-value of photographs, the place Art History has in contemporary art. They are arresting precisely because they are destabilizing, their beauty and magic shining through Stegner’s uncanny creations.
Jansson Stegner (b. 1972, Denver; lives and works in California) received his MFA from the University of Albany, New York. Stegner has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions with Sorry We’re Closed, Brussels; Bellwether Gallery, New York; Mike Weiss Gallery, New York; and most recently, Almine Rech Gallery, New York. Stegner was the recipient of the 2010 Art Brussels: Collectors’ Choice Award and was the 2015 Deutsche Bank NYFA Fellow. Stegner is represented by Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles and Sorry We’re Closed, Brussels.