Damian Stamer’s melancholy paintings of the sometimes bleak rural North Carolina (USA) remind of faded photographs. Here, the artist spent his youth and has re-discovered his pictorial objects - often barns and sheds – anew as a painter. The titles indicate locations familiar to Stamer, and which in generalized terms are similar to countless others in rural America. In all their banality, these places are of absurd beauty. Color is used tonally and very sparingly in these predominantly monochrome scenes of meadows and barns, captured in various states of disrepair; a dichotomy of color and landscape, of abstraction and figuration, unfolds its exciting impact in these paintings.
"How do you paint a full picture of a place that contains non-visual things?" asks Damian Stamer. His artistic answers are an integration of the past and pushing the limits of abstraction. Through Stamer’s way of painting - more a subtraction of dissolved paint marks than additive layering - past and present are inextricably linked in these works; the images permanently call on the state of passing and of the already ruined. Damian Stamer’s landscapes let us reflect on time in a different manner than the usual approach.