Artist Statement
I am a figure painter who uses cocktails of stock visual symbolism to play with the construction of meaning, both in imagery and people. By using personal acquaintances as models, I attempt to interface what I project onto them with their own aspirations, to create fraught and malleable documents of our relationships with both each other and the outside world.
In an effort to more explicitly frame the elements in my constructions, I remove all background elements from my pictures. Initially this was done with exposed metal surfaces, but since 2013 I have employed flat white backgrounds to generate a space of maximized visual clarity. Objects such as food, musical instruments, insects, and animal skulls are employed for their visceral associations. The apple, with its loaded history in the Western canon is avoided unless absolutely needed as a blunt implement. The pepper has only existed within the consciousness of Western art for five centuries or so. It allows me to create an allegorical space where there exists the possibility for novel interpretations and narratives to take hold.
These portraits are meant to border on storytelling, and it is my hope that like a game of telephone, the assembled elements will be transformed first by the act of painting, and later in the act of viewing. I approach each work with concrete themes in mind, but try to avoid prescribed resolutions.
Bio
James Stamboni was born in Mount Kisco, NY. He graduated with his BFA from SUNY New Paltz before getting certified to teach art in New York State’s public schools. In 2016, he was poisoned by a fluoroquinolone antibiotic. The associated connective tissue damage would cost him the ability to walk on hard surfaces without the use of leg braces, as well as the ability to work as an educator in a public setting. Over the following six years, complications from this iatrogenic chronic illness nearly took his life on three occasions, before a combination of experimental treatments assisted in enough recovery to allow him to leave his apartment and begin painting again.
He currently lives in Lower Westchester, where he splits his time between commissioned portraiture and large scale figurative works. Autism allows him to replicate most things he sees in two dimensions, and to retain pretty much any information that kindles his interest. You are encouraged to talk to him about jazz, or most other music.
