The Kravets/Wehby Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings by Stan Narten opening on Thursday, April 9 and running through May 9, 2009.

Stan Narten’s meticulous paintings are at once abstract and figurative. Starting with selected television and film stills, mostly cult material from the 1980s and 1990s Stan manipulates the imagery by digitally cutting up and carefully re-ordering the pieces to create a new image. The scenes he culls are often of fleeting dramatic, macabre moments. From here a transcendent painting emerges with depth and movement, emotion and life. The painting re-authenticates, re-forms and congeals the subject into a wholly new adaptation while distinctly retaining elements of the original image.

Stan often incorporates various forms of glitches that interfere with the dimensionality of the surface, and reference ‘floaters’, ‘seeing stars’ or other interruptions to the way we see. Viewing the paintings creates a type of involuntary pareidolia which is a psychological phenomenon involving vague and random sounds being perceived as significant. The mind is trained to see human and animal forms in indistinct visual information, like a bat in a Rorschach test, or the Virgin Mary in a slice of toast. The differentiation between what is interpreted and what actually exists is elusive.

Stan Narten is a 2008 graduate from the School of Visual Arts in New York. This will be his first solo exhibition at the gallery.