Tim Stoner’s early watercolours offer disarming illusions of utopia. He infuses his ethereal, enigmatic scenes – of days at the country club, on tropical beaches, at summer camps or cocktail parties – with sharp, eerie contrasts of illumination and shadow. ‘The subject of Stoner's work is light,’ writes the critic Adrian Searle, ‘and how painting both creates an illusory space and destroys it with its flatness.’ Working from photographs, the artist picks out his costumed, faceless figures against white in a monochrome graphic style reminiscent of woodcuts or comic-books. Shot through with echoes of Goya, Matisse and folk art, his works appear before the viewer like relics from a lost society. Trained at the Royal College of Art, London and the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, Stoner has exhibited widely, and is currently featured in the Hayward Gallery’s touring group exhibition Slow Painting. His work is held in major collections including the Sammlung Goetz, Munich and the Rubell Family Collection, Miami.