Stabat Mater

Inman Gallery, Houston, Texas

May 17— June 22, 2013

Stabat Mater (The Mother Stood), a body of work comprised of fourteen oil on wood panel paintings, derives its title from the 13th century Catholic hymn that contemplates the sorrowful states of Mary at Christ’s crucifixion.  This liturgical tradition ignited an entire corpus of both musical and painterly expressions on the subject of Christian pathos - an esthetic of rapturous suffering.  The theme is dominant throughout much of Western art history, including paintings from Pietro Perugino to Francis Bacon, to the breath-taking compositions of Giovanni Palestrina, Giovanni Pergolesi and contemporary composer Nico Muhly.

Through painterly abstraction, Waterston set out to explore themes of mystical and corporeal reverie, ecstatic states arrived at through suffering. In this series of paintings, he often marred the surfaces of the panels with disembodied cuts, wounds, abrasions, the gathering of tears or refractions of light. Firmament becomes flesh, at once atmospheric and bodily, which is so often the impression or feeling Waterston experienced as he listened to the great Stabat Mater compositions while painting this work.