‘For a decade, I have borrowed books from Frances Stark. In them are often the marks of a mangy reader. Without much effort I have found, “OoOh?, OoOH!” “Pedantic dick!” and “OHMYGODOHHMYYGODDDD.” This last climactic note was in a turned out copy of poems Emily Dickinson wrote on unfolded envelopes. Consider such poems a matriarchal precedent for Stark’s new painting. Here at Basel, Stark explores her old essays as painted shape. Paint and mark distort, setting aside legibility as a painted-English, unsettled and secret, prevails. There is grace and humor in the slippage. The painting gives old thought new form as the past is not beheld in solitude (lethal!) but aired in public as if to ask, “Well Stark, what has come of all this thinking?” What we have is a history painting with no real history or great moment of record, only domestic life in the oughts–plush but dire, free but under surveillance, exhausted but going faster than ever. What Dickinson called, A still–Volcano–Life–.’ – Robert Snowden, 2018
