Uncanny Valley
‘Alan Stanners’ paintings reveal an investment in the legacies of surrealism,
while retaining an astute questioning of what it means to revisit such legaies from
present perspectives. With a mature clarity of approach, this interrogation maintains a self-aware position while embedding itself within the paintings themselves,
objects already shot-through with an understanding of their history.

Masks lift off to reveal hollow, shadowy absences, disembodied, stretched-out faces reminiscent of David Lynch’s ‘Eraserhead’. Two blackbirds peck at each other. These clichés work as ciphers for the inverted norm, the ‘other’, a surrealist intention.
Anthropomorphized fingers slink off from the corner of a painting like sexualized female legs - the familiar view of an object is transformed through desirous projection. This is the long-neutralised language of a once avant-garde project. As such, these deadened place holders are couched in gauche swathes of expressionist
mark-making or jaundiced colour, often held in place by shallow landscapes or floating in nondescript space, as though from imaginative projection.

However, rather than adopting the familiar stance of mocking pastiche, Stanners’ paintings develop a complex enquiry which re-stages an historical problem in the present. His grammar is the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ of this process.’
(Darren Rhymes, Map Magazine, issue 15, Autumn 2008, pg. 26-27)

Martin van Zomeren is pleased to present Uncanny Valley, the first solo
presentation of the Scottish artist Alan Stanners.

Stanners (1985, Dundee) works and lives in Glasgow. Upon graduation at the at Glasgow School of Art in 2007, the artist had participated in various exhibitions such as ‘More Pricks than Kicks’ at the Generator Projects, Dundee,
and ‘Shuttlereime’ at Office Baroque Gallery, Antwerp (2008).
Upcoming shows include solo presentation at Studio Warehouse, Glasgow (March, 2009). Stanners will be taking part in a residency at gallery Patricia Low, Switzerland, (2009).