Popes and Pillars

Please join us for the opening celebration Thursday 12th February 6-8pm

Text by Dr F.J. Nagle

Robert’s compositional technique evolved out of a life lived in Italy, New York and the accidental weekend onboard the Caribbean Islands; all essential ingredients for an artist of the Victor D’Amico Institute, The Students Art League of NY and more recently the American Academy in Rome.    

His paintings are shot through with melancholy and the fleetingness of life and yet desolately beautiful. They have moved  with some remnants of earlier collage,  into slightly abstract figuration; what was photo media driven collage, is now “what was the alter boy seeing”.

This show is a map of the artist’s path, from anxiety to acceptance; of what new vistas opened for him after the seemingly never ending tragedy of life lived in New York, since the AIDs epidemic of ’82 and COVID in 2020.

Reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp’s “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even” (1915-23). There are strong  panels, and reflected panels that are sparer, partially effaced, and a cryptic allure to its symmetry: a Rorschach blot, a butterfly’s wings. But the reflections are mismatched in weight as well as appearance; 

The palette of squeezed-from-the-tube primary colours, the paint-by-number seemed to deny any emotional possibility for abstraction. But something starts happening: with colour, the mark-making comes alive despite the painter’s reserve.

The paintings seem to come out of the fragments of art history — out of the dead, in other words, rumbling and rattling beneath the swirling strokes. There was Duchamp, of course, and also Picasso, whose ghoulish prostitutes in “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907) have faces scarred while here the figuration spiral heavenly as once sculptura of Roman antiquity against the gravity of time. 

The paintings have sex, and death;  but this art has comprised a galaxy of allusions where, even in the shadow of mortality, invention and even hope might bloom. You only truly live when you become aware you will die — only live, as Heidegger insisted, “when one becomes free for one’s own death,” and so can make authentic choices in your one and only life. For Robert these are life-affirming works: a calculated method that has opened onto a new artistic freedom.