Jason Stopa's The Gate Exhibition at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects Explores Painting as Performance

Jason Stopa's exhibition The Gate at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects ran from August 2 to 31, 2018, located at 208 Forsyth Street in New York City. The artist describes his paintings as stages where marks and images function as actors. Seven paintings were displayed against a red and yellow diamond pattern painted directly on the gallery walls, creating a unified visual environment. Works like Two Views of Nature (2018) and Johari Window (2018) feature pictures-within-pictures, with red lines outlining stages and inverted color schemes. Another pair, In the Pavilion (for Harold Budd) (2018) and Syrian Damask Rose (Mushroom Cloud) (2018), present forms resembling audience seating or explosions, positioning viewers between spectacle and spectator. The entrance to the gate (2018) and Johari Window employ diamond patterns and vertical stripes without perspectival depth, while The Big Picture (2018) contains eight representations of calligraphic paintings overlaid by a larger one. Stopa's brushwork appears both deliberate and effortless, with areas of tubular impasto snapping illusionistic spaces back to flatness. Each painting includes a work placed en-abyme that echoes its dominant shape, such as an arch or mushroom cloud. The exhibition creates a paradoxical space where viewers are simultaneously inside and outside the artwork, with a fictional audience watching from painted theaters. The performance remains ongoing, blurring boundaries between reality and depiction.