Elinor Stanley: Tropo
In the paintings presented in the exhibition Tropo, Elinor Stanley puts on stage our daily life at the height of its intensity. It is no one’s life in particular. Anyone and everyone could hide beneath the locks of brown hair of the female characters, or behind the swollen heads of her male counterparts. Each of us is, in turn, the object and the subject of the gaze, performing and experiencing the transformations that are brought about by the desire of the other. By looking at someone, we carve them out of the world. Where there used to be only an indistinct landscape, our intent gazing brings forth the presence of “someone”. When we are looked at, we ourselves are created.
Because a certain kind of gaze is like a voice that utters the magic word of creation: “you”. Looking at each other, the figures in Elinor Stanley’s paintings appear to treat each other as “you,” and in that instant the entire melodrama of our lives unfolds. Perhaps, no one said more lyrically than Sandor Marai, the great Hungarian novelist, with words that could almost be heard emanating from the paintings collected in Tropo:
verse, a painful word that forms and names, that enlivens identity and gives it
low mortals, distinguishes you from those whom in part you resemble; it hoists
It is a fearsome word. “You”, [she] writes, and the instant she writes the word
you are ennobled. ... “You”, she writes, and... she places on paper the only word
that can hold the sentence, the syntax, together as though she had addressed the
ing “you”, it is as if she were engaged in an act of creation, re-creating you.>>
