The Good Land: Jansson Stegner
by Sarah Cunningham
Jansson Stegner paints people – just, not real people. He clarifies that his paintings are not portraits, but rather the culmination of composites of studio-based studies, internet searches, and his imagination. Lately, however, Stegner is shifting his approach toward portraiture and occasionally using a single sitter for his nevertheless highly stylized figures. Stegner credits his youthful infatuation with comic books for his interest in art and particularly exaggerated depictions of the human form.
In a recent conversation with Sasha Bogojev for Juxtapoz magazine, Stegner says, “To make a painting interesting, you need to blend familiarity with unfamiliarity or strangeness with normalcy. Too much normalcy and it’s boring. Too much strangeness and it’s unrelatable.” Since his grad school days at the University of Albany in the late 1990s, when I first met him, Stegner has been honing what he calls “weird figuration,” a distinctive lexicon of corporeal distortions– extreme elongation of the body, oversized torsos with small heads, and, most notably, a pointed reversal of typical male/female musculature. He lists Schiele, Dix, Grosz, Balthus, El Greco, Ingres, Ensor, and Neel as inspirational artistic predecessors who likewise employ hyperbolic figuration.
Born in Denver and raised in Minneapolis, Stegner relocated to Goleta in 2019 after nearly 20 years in New York City. Readers here on the Central Coast will recognize the name of his recent solo show, The Good Land, at Nino Mier Gallery in LA as a call out to his newfound hometown. In most of Stegner’s oeuvre to date, the background is the background, often a wash of color with little or no contextual details. Instead, the viewer is invited into Stegner’s far reaching fictive world through his characters– a languid cop slipping off his chair or an athletic champion posing with her volleyball– rather than via a specific narrative or landscape. While his newest paintings continue to center the figure, more background details emerge, particularly ones that both reflect and reimagine the good land of the Central Coast. Stegner’s still sparing use of details gives them heightened importance as narrative allusions, allowing the viewer to envision what lies beyond the edges of the plane.
Jansson Stegner, Watermelon, oil on linen, 2021
In Watermelon, Stegner fuses still life and portraiture in an abundantly verdant scene, but it’s one that’s not quite bucolic. That “not quite” is at the core of his work; he illustrates people and things that are simultaneously straightforward and not quite what they seem. On the surface, the female subject stands behind a table serving freshly cut watermelon to the viewer. However, something about the simple scene feels awry. With clear delineation between the edge of the table tipping from the figure towards the viewer in the lower third of the painting and the lush background in the upper two thirds, Watermelon can almost be read as two discrete paintings in one. Below, a memento mori still life in which the watermelon’s once sweet life bleeds out, dripping over the lip of the cutting board into darkness. Above, a portrait of a strong woman looking somewhat defiantly at the viewer. The subject’s stance, with her inner arms turned forward and weight on the heels of her hands as she leans on the table, parallels the barmaid’s pose in Edouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. Yet here, in contrast to Manet, Stegner has no interest in depicting ordinary life nor average people. In keeping with his earlier celebratory paintings of female athletes, Stegner’s subject is heroically muscular, her arms and shoulders impressively large and her waist narrow.
Exaggerated further by foreshortening, her self-possessed power invites a re-reading of the enormous knife stuck upright in the dome of the juicy fruit as the sword Excalibur. Potentially she is both the magician who lodged the blade in stone and the rightful regent who will unsheath it. This ambiguous duality typifies Stegner’s storytelling through his characters. Likewise, the figure is clad in the tight-fitting cotton blend jersey of a contemporary athlete while the artistic style, medium and symbolic references of the painting have historical allusions. Stegner puts past and present in constant dialogue with each other, disrupting linear time and creating an even deeper level of confusion.
When he moved to California, Stegner told me he was excited to see how the new landscape would impact his work. At the time, he was completing a new suite of paintings for an exhibition at Almine Reich in NYC, which opened in early March 2020. I vividly remember Eagle Hunter, among the first works Stegner completed in his new studio, as depicting not only Southern California’s landscape but its storied light.
In The Good Land exhibition, Stegner’s new landscape continues to add depth to his pseudo portraits with a particular interest in the garden and its abundance. In The Backyard, a strapping young woman atop a ladder looks into the far distance. From the viewer’s vantage point below, she is above the clouds with only blue sky behind her. Her knees are hidden by the fence which – like the watermelon cutting board– takes up the bottom third of the painting and separates the foreground from the rest of the image. In the flattened space, she appears to be growing from the vines that entwine the fence rather than climbing the ladder behind it.
Jansson Stegner, Good Times, Oil on Linen, 2021
Through this minimal use of landscape, Stegner creates a scene with multiple possibilities suggesting the subject is looking to escape the garden by jumping the fence, ascending to heaven, or picking (the forbidden) fruit from the (barren) tree. However, Stegner’s most overt reference to the Garden of Eden is in Along El Sueño Road, in which another preternaturally strong woman looks knowingly over her shoulder at the viewer as she plucks a bloom from the flowering tree that surrounds her. While Stegner rejects critique that his work is gratuitously erotic, he does make sexy work– sexy in luscious paint, sexy in his subjects’ powerful bodies, and, here, sexy in her direct gaze that demands in return, “Look at me.” In this piece, Stegner simultaneously borrows from and upends both art historical depictions of Eve and pin up posters– another popular art form that employs pronounced proportions– to illustrate self-knowing sexuality as powerful rather than shameful.
Jansson Stegner, Orange Picker,
While more lithe and lean than his female counterparts, the male subject in Orange Picker also appears larger than life through Stegner’s signature use of elongation and his position in the extreme foreground of the picture plane. His superhuman size and figural distortion is emphasized even more in comparison to his fellow harvesters, who are depicted with standard proportions and Lilliputian scale. Although this painting contains the most contextual information, with the orchard and farmhands, Stegner uses a low vantage point to exaggerate the man’s height and to illustrate him transcending earthly concerns with his long torso and delicate head against the sky, similar to The Backyard. The vignette of gray clouds emphasizes the brightness of the figure, but also hints of something amiss in this pastoral paradise.
Further exploring the metaphorical storm in Lifeguard, Stegner depicts a dark foreboding sky and swirling sea foam rather than a sunny day at the beach. The juxtaposition of the contemporary (the figure in her red flip flops) and the historical (the dark blue green of the stormy sea) is especially pronounced in this piece. Although the darkness implies risky conditions at sea, the titular lifeguard turns her attention inland toward the light and reclines leisurely on the large rock in the lapping tide. In a move away from Stegner’s personal phenotypes, the woman embodies both the robust physique of his female athletes and the languorous pose of the male police officers in his earlier work. Using this contradiction in his own lexicon, Stegner again establishes a duality in which his subject is both the savior and the siren, a real life superhero who may dive to our rescue or seduce us into dangerous waters.
As someone who has watched Stegner’s practice evolve over more than 20 years, his subjects- however transformed- have always been recognizable, beginning with images of his now wife and more recently of his teenaged son. Therefore, his recent embrace of single sitter portraits (identified with the person’s name in the title) is especially interesting to me. In particular, Lucia at the Patio Door stands out in this exhibit for its specificity of a fixed person, time, and place while continuing to explore his signature “weird figuration” and garden metaphors. Like Stegner’s female athletes, Lucia is tall and muscular, broad shoulders and bulging thighs undulating in contrast with her small head, slim waist and too tiny feet. She stands in the light at the threshold of a sliding glass door, a vertical sliver of which reflects the garden outside. Stegner thereby employs a formal structure similar to Watermelon or The Backyard using a delineated foreground plane to present a painting within a painting although the setting is contemporary. Lucia’s tight fitting floral pants bring the natural world inside, emphasizing– as with all The Good Land paintings – the connection between humans and the natural world. Having visited Stegner’s then home, I recognize the exacting details of the stair railings and the midcentury style coffee table in the dark recesses of the interior, but, even without that knowledge, all viewers will recognize that this scene is fixed in the present without the ambiguity of time that characterizes Stegner’s other paintings in the exhibit. Stegner’s shift to depicting specific people in contemporary settings in this piece roots all of the work in the exhibit more firmly in the present and encourages viewers to explore the extraordinary in ordinary life.
