Temptation, 2009 Oil on Canvas by Stacy Stewart Smith

Temptation is the painting that does not look away.

The final work of the Resurrection series, this monumental oil on canvas — 54" × 80" — closes the cycle not with transcendence but with confrontation. Where earlier works in the series reached toward the divine, Temptation turns the gaze inward, toward the most human of failures: the capacity to hate, and the silence that allows it to grow.

At the left of the composition, a colossal ear rendered in daubs of Cadmium red and Rose Madder dominates the canvas. It is not a portrait. It is an address. It is you — the viewer — being asked to listen, and in listening, to reckon. Across the canvas, a darkened town sits beneath a cooling sunset, rendered in deep Prussian blues, its stillness the stillness of willful blindness. And suspended above it, almost imperceptible in its smallness: a tiny noose. The disproportion is the point. Hatred begins small. It is always small, until it is not.

Smith’s Abstractrealism here operates at its most prophetic. The painting was completed in 2009, but its vision of American racial hatred — its capacity to smolder quietly, to be fed by power, to become colossal — reads as a work that knew what was coming. It is a painting about end times, yes, but more precisely about the moment before them: the private moment when we are alone with the conception of our own sin.

For those whom this painting will offend, it is a call to ask oneself why.

Oil on Canvas · 54" × 80" · 2009
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