Strauss & co - 15 February 2020, Cape Town

83  SIMON STONE SOUTH AFRICAN 1952– Untitled I-III; three signed; Untitled I and Untitled II inscribed with the artist’s name and title on an Ebony Gallery label on the reverse oil on canvas 127 by 102cm (3) R240 000 – 360 000 whatever one sees in a Stone painting exists in reality, and it was either painted in front of that reality, or whilst consulting a photograph, drawing or some other record of it. Whenever Stone spots something that excites his visual faculties, he photographs or draws it, and if it occurs in a magazine or newspaper, he cuts it out and adds it to his reference files. This has been his consistent practice over decades … His watercolour sketchbooks often supply motifs for his paintings, and they are supplemented by an enormous image bank “Ever since Simon Stone made his artistic debut in 1977, seemingly random conjunctions of unrelated motifs were the defining characteristic of his art, and so they have remained. Their role was somewhat curtailed during his high Expressionist phase from 1984 to 1988, but thereafter [as is the case with the present series], juxtaposition again became the artist’s trademark, and the visual magic one associates with his name, emerges most fully in his visual miscellanies. Stone’s most characteristic works consist of apparently fortuitous combinations of heterogeneous images executed in different idioms, and it is his use of juxtaposition as a compositional method that explains the difficulties his paintings present. Finding the logical thread linking the separate images is difficult. This renders interpretation problematic, and explains why many viewers can claim that Stone’s work relies purely on its visual impact, and that it does not necessarily ‘say’ anything. The artist claims that he has no imagination, and that he is entirely reliant on the actual and the seen. Apart from purely abstract motifs, 100