For over forty years, Michael St. John has been painting American cultural consciousness as it circulates, collapses, and persists — tabloid headlines, celebrity faces, cartoon characters, found objects, all given equal painterly attention. In 2023–2024, he gave this long investigation an explicit frame: The Interregnum, a series invoking Gramsci's observation that in crisis, "the old is dying and the new cannot be born."
Visiting his studio in early 2026 reveals how the work has evolved. The newest paintings are studies in reduction and tension. Each pairs a face — sometimes clearly sourced (Emma Stone, a TikTok character, the mask from The Strangers), sometimes more ambiguous (a baby, a cat) — with a geometric color field. The relationships vary: sometimes the field frames the face, sometimes it obscures it completely, sometimes the two elements coexist side-by-side in uneasy equilibrium. The palette has shifted from The Interregnum's vibrant oranges and greens to something more subdued — pale yellows fading to white, soft pinks, muted reds, grays and browns.
Stand in front of these new paintings and you're confronted with apparent simplicity that refuses to stay simple. These are ravishingly executed paintings. The surfaces are impossibly smooth, the transitions from tone to tone so subtle they seem to breathe. Emma Stone's profile is rendered with a precision that recalls both Renaissance portraiture and commercial illustration, neither ironic nor nostalgic but genuinely synthesizing both languages. The geometric fields — a muted crimson rectangle, pale yellow bands, a deep green surround — employ color relationships that speak fluently to Albers and Marden, while remaining entirely contemporary in their atmospheric muted presence.
St. John doesn't shy from art historical precedent; he deploys it with confidence. The formal economy recalls Vermeer's reduction of complex spaces to essential geometric relationships. The smooth surfaces and idealized features nod to Ingres. The pairing of figuration and geometric abstraction engages Johns, Warhol, and more recently Sherrod without deference or anxiety. This is an artist who knows the history and speaks its languages fluently — not to prove knowledge but because these languages remain vital tools for seeing and making now.
In his 1919 essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," T.S. Eliot described what he called the "historical sense": "a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence." For Eliot, the mature artist doesn't work against tradition or merely cite it, but operates within a living system where past and present exist simultaneously.
St. John embodies this historical sense. Renaissance portraiture, color field abstraction, Pop appropriation — these aren't dead styles to resurrect but living languages available for present use. The past isn't burden (as Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence" would have it) but resource, not weight but vocabulary.
The sources are democratic: Emma Stone from film, a viral TikTok character's exaggerated grin, the burlap mask from The Strangers, a baby with cancer, internet cat memes. High and low, documentary and fiction, human and cartoon — all treated with the same muted palette, the same formal care, the same painterly generosity.
What's striking is how the work's beauty doesn't soften its difficulty. The virtuosity doesn't aestheticize away the content's weight — a baby with cancer, a horror mask, identity dissolving. Instead, the beauty creates conditions where you can stay present with what you might otherwise turn from. The craft isn't showing off — it's necessity. These paintings needed to be this carefully made to do what they do: hold difficult material in sustained attention, make the unbearable bearable enough to witness, create space where looking remains possible even when — especially when — what you're looking at resists easy consumption.
Contemplation as Bardo Practice
These paintings demand contemplation — not as passive aesthetic enjoyment but as active sustained attention in the face of difficulty. In Tibetan Buddhism, the bardo describes the transitional state between death and rebirth, characterized by disorientation, dissolution of familiar structures, and overwhelming visions. Successfully navigating the bardo requires contemplative practice: the ability to maintain awareness without being swept away, to stay present with what arises without clinging or fleeing.
St. John's paintings function as training grounds for this kind of attention. The virtuosity enforces slowness: you cannot rush past surfaces this carefully constructed, transitions this subtle, relationships this precisely calibrated. Each painting required hours, perhaps days, of the artist's sustained looking to create; they ask for minutes of yours to truly see. This is contemplation not as transcendent removal from difficulty but as sustained presence to it — exactly what bardo teachings prescribe.
The muted palette — those pale yellows, soft pinks, drained reds — creates atmospheric space that rewards patient attention. Colors reveal themselves gradually: what seemed simply "gray" discloses layers, temperatures, relationships. The geometric fields aren't instantly readable; their relationship to the figures shifts the longer you look. Is that muted crimson rectangle beside Emma Stone's profile threatening her, protecting her, simply coexisting? The painting won't answer quickly. Like consciousness in the bardo, you must stay present without knowing where you're going, what you'll find, or when resolution will come.
What Gramsci called the interregnum — "the old is dying and the new cannot be born" — describes our collective political and cultural condition. What Tibetan Buddhism terms the bardo describes the psychological and spiritual state this produces: suspended between states, unable to return to what was or move forward to what's next, navigating without stable ground. St. John's work operates at this intersection, creating conditions where contemplative attention to the interregnum becomes possible. The paintings don't solve the crisis or escape it; they model how to inhabit it with awareness rather than denial or despair.
The Polyglot in the Interregnum
But these aren't restful paintings. For all their formal beauty and careful craft, they won't let you settle into comfortable aesthetic distance. This is agitation in its root sense: stirring, disturbing, keeping in motion. And the source of this agitation is St. John's polyglot capacity — his fluency in multiple visual and cultural languages simultaneously.
Michael St. John might be understood as a visual polyglot: fluent in 19th-century trompe l'oeil, color field abstraction, Pop appropriation, internet aesthetics, horror cinema, celebrity culture. He doesn't translate between these languages but thinks multilingually, combining them naturally to create paintings that speak several vocabularies at once. This synthesis is what creates the work's fundamental restlessness.
Consider the agitation this produces: Emma Stone's profile painted with Renaissance portraiture precision paired with Albers-inspired color field geometry. Your eye can't settle on "this is a portrait" or "this is an abstract investigation of color relationships" — it's both simultaneously, and the friction between languages keeps you alert, unsettled. A TikTok character rendered with the same virtuosity as an Old Master painting — the collision of internet ephemerality and painterly permanence, viral culture and high craft, refuses to resolve into single meaning.
The democratic range of sources intensifies this agitation. The paintings won't let you settle into stable emotional or interpretive registers. You can't rest in "this is about celebrity culture" because the next painting presents a baby with cancer. You can't frame it as "this is about suffering" because then you encounter a cartoon cat. The content resists contemplative peace even as the formal beauty invites sustained looking. High and low, documentary and fiction, urgent and absurd — all treated with identical painterly care, all refusing hierarchy, all speaking at once.
This polyphonic quality — like George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) with its hundreds of competing voices — creates cognitive and emotional restiveness. The interregnum isn't quiet; it's deafeningly noisy. St. John's polyglot paintings hold multiple cultural voices simultaneously: tabloid headlines, found objects, painted elements, appropriated images, art historical references, internet memes. The work doesn't quiet this cacophony or organize it into hierarchy. Instead, the formal structures — geometric frames, color fields, careful composition — create conditions where the noise becomes perceivable rather than overwhelming, where you can stay present with multiplicity without being paralyzed by it.
Generosity as Solidarity
A less generous artist might use all this material to make a clear political statement. However, St. John's work is not a political screed — it's conscious of violence, tragedy, cultural breakdown, the "monstrosities" of the interregnum. But the paintings resist instrumentalization. They don't advocate positions, prescribe solutions, or mobilize viewers toward action. Instead, they are witness: making visible what's here, creating conditions where sustained looking at difficult material becomes possible.
This isn't evasion of political responsibility but claim of different responsibility — the artist's work is to see clearly and help others see, not to provide answers or take sides. The democracy isn't political platform but formal practice: all images treated equally, all entry points valid, all viewers' encounters their own.
St. John meets viewers in whatever language they speak. If you understand TikTok culture, Emma Stone's films, or Marden's color relationships, you'll find a way into the work. The polyglot capacity creates multiple entry points — you don't need to be multilingual yourself to have a genuine encounter. Come through celebrity culture, come through art history, come through horror films, come through formal relationships — all paths are legitimate.
St. John's generosity isn't kindness from above — it's solidarity from within. He's not truth-teller standing outside cultural chaos pronouncing judgment; he's participant in the same hyperreal condition we all inhabit, working with the same circulating images, experiencing the same media saturation, navigating the same interregnum. The paintings don't say "let me explain what's happening" — they say "here's what I'm seeing from inside this with you."
Painting in These Days
St. John titled a recent series simply "These Days" — a casual phrase that captures the exhausted, ongoing, unresolved quality of the present moment. And in this moment when so much contemporary figuration feels stagnant — retreating into nostalgic styles, serving illustrative functions, or performing ironic distance — St. John's polyglot practice advances painting's possibilities. By synthesizing multiple visual languages simultaneously, by speaking contemporary culture's vernaculars through painting's material specificity, by creating new viewing modes that hold contemplation and agitation together, he demonstrates what painting can do now that it couldn't do before and that no other medium can do.
This isn't painting defending its relevance or proving it can adapt. This is painting discovering capacities specific to this moment — the ability to slow infinite circulation enough for sustained witness, to create physical anchors in dematerializing culture, to hold irresolution in formal structures, to offer intimate encounter with collective crisis.
St. John's work proposes that painting isn't legacy medium trying to stay relevant — it's living practice uniquely suited to navigating the interregnum. The bardo needs painting's particular temporality, materiality, and synthetic capacity. These days need this kind of looking. The medium advances by discovering what only it can do now.
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