Truth made unbearable
Ian Stone's meticulously rendered still life and figurative paintings explore queer memory and camp through carefully arranged collections of ornamental and personal objects, with the body positioned as a site through which identity is formed, expressed, and remembered. Informed by traditions of 19th-century Realism and Western art history, his oil paintings and drawings are rich in detail and cultural awareness, reflecting how femininity, longing, and performance shape contemporary queer life. Paintings are unframed, while works on paper are framed under glass.
Artist's description:
A tattooed hand holds a butterfly delicately between thumb and forefinger. The gesture is careful, practiced, intimate. It knows exactly how much pressure is being applied.
This hand belongs to the present. It carries marks of a life lived after what has already happened, after the history that names the butterfly and stains it. To hold it now is not an act of discovery, but of recognition. The hand knows what this body has meant, how it has been used, and what it has survived. There is no way to touch this history without altering it. The truth cannot be handled lightly, nor can it be released without consequence. What is fragile here is not only the butterfly, but the distance between knowing and harming, between care and inevitability.
This work confesses that awareness itself can be dangerous. That to see oneself clearly—to name desire, inheritance, and loss—is to accept that innocence is no longer possible. The truth becomes unbearable not because it is unknown, but because it is finally held.
- Ian Stone, 2025
