Will Stovall’s first exhibition in Germany is inspired by one of the Ur-texts of modernity: Luis Vélez de Guevara’s seventeenth-century fiction of a flight over Madrid during which a devil lifts the roofs of houses to expose the private lives of the capital’s residents. Guevara wrote his novel at the same time that Diego Velázquez was painting Las Meninas, and it shares with that other great Spanish work of the age of the Scientific Revolution an interest in the seduction of seeing, the limits of what can be seen, and the devices by which we enhance our field of vision. For centuries to come, the motif of the flying devil lifting the roofs had a profound, if increasingly latent, impact on European and American narratives of social observation.
Stovall’s paintings, executed in acrylic and watercolor on canvas, return to Guevara’s fiction as a way to confront our own continuing fascination with—and anxieties over—surveillance and total visibility. In contrast to Guevara’s silence on the mechanics behind the “roofs-off” moment, Stovall focuses on how such an apparatus of surveillance might actually be imagined. This step beyond the novel into the technical realizability of an expanded mode of observation is where painting as a medium—and espe- cially the example of Las Meninas’snetwork of optical appearances—enters with its own particular force. Stovall’s paintings reflect on the entanglement of technology and phantasm in the production of total visibility.
–Martin Wagner
Will Stovall (b. 1983, Washington, D.C.) received an MFA in Painting from Bard College and a PhD in German Languages and Literature from Yale University, with a dissertation on the institutional imagi- nation of the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. He has lectured at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and The Phillips Collection, as well as at Yale University, Princeton University, and George Washington University, where he teaches painting and art theory. Recent solo exhibitions include Lifeworld Variations at Château Shatto, Los Angeles (2025), and Kant Crisis at Ulrik, New York (2024).
