welcome..

theres no way i can show the entirity of shows or even works in this format. so this site mearly serves as a scrapbook. for more formal images please email a agent for hi res images. cv. reviews ect. thanks.

i am available for presentations..performance and exhibitions nationally and internationally.
and would welcome any opportunity to participate.

aswell as being a artist ive been working on myself in many ways (coause ive had too) in terms of wellness and meditation
i do qi gong. a ancient chineese practice.
for more info
see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9dcsk4EP28




email jamesrobinson@paradise.net.nz

up comeing next-------------------------------------------

"INSTINCT AND SPIRIT"

a painting and drawing dealer show in gisbourne at paulnache gallery.
opening august 6th.
the artist will be in attendance (as he has to get the art there and hang it after all)

PAULNACHE
UPSTAIRS 89 GREY STREET
GISBORNE 4010 NEW ZEALAND
WED-FRI 10-5 + SAT 10-3
NOW@PAULNACHE.COM
+64 6 867 9721
PAULNACHE.COM



RUSSIAN FROST FARMERS

www.therussianfrostfarmers.com

artist run space eva dixon off courtney place central wellington (behind dreamgirls)

"palimpsest"
back of canvas and drawing installation
headcamera footage..deconstructed stretcher assemblige
backs of mural in wall (of landscape noise)
backs of drawings.
this is process...and art from out of the manner of which it is made..before the intent.
unconscious rythems that succeed the formal intent.
dream stain exhaust marks.

with
BLACK BONE ANGEL
sonic dark noise meisters
and the russian frost farmers warm up.

sat...26th june (fool moon solstice-ish) 6pm
----------------------------------------------------did some drawing at freds improv with jeff henderson and keiran monahan. this is you tube action.

http://www.youtube.com/user/soundexplorers
--------------------------------------------------------
find art to buy at agents......from top of the country down.

PAULNACHE
UPSTAIRS 89 GREY STREET
GISBORNE 4010 NEW ZEALAND
WED-FRI 10-5 + SAT 10-3
NOW@PAULNACHE.COM
+64 6 867 9721
PAULNACHE.COM


MARK HUTCHINS GALLERY
Level 1,
82 Willis Street
Wellington
email mark@mhgallery.co.nz

papergraphica (drawing works)
192 Bealey Ave
Christchurch 1
New Zealand
ph/fax 0064 3 366 8487
www.papergraphica.co.nz
papergraphica@ihug.co.nz
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Curriculum Vitae
James Robinson
Mobile phone: (021) 202 8628
e-mail: jamesrobinson@paradise.net.nz
website: www.jamesrobinson.co.nz



Education

2000: Bachelor of Fine Arts, Otago School of Fine Arts
(major in Painting, minor in Printmaking)
1996: Diploma in Art and Craft, Hungry Creek School of Art and Craft
1990: Foundation in Fine Art, Nelson Polytechnic

Artistic Achievements
Awards
2009: Finalist, Waikato Art Award
2007: Paramount Winner of the Wallace Art Awards 2007
2006: Finalist, Adam Portrait Award, National Portrait Gallery
2006: Finalist, Wallace Art Awards 2004
2003 Finalist, NCC Art Award for Reclaimed Materials
2003: Finalist, Wallace Art Awards’
2002: Finalist, for the Wallace Art Awards 2002
2002: Finalist, Wallace Art Awards 2000

Artist Residencies
2009: Takt Kunstprojektraum art residency East Berlin, Germany
2008: Tylee Cottage Residency, Whanganui, New Zealand (July–December)
International Studio and Curatorial Programme, New York, USA (January–June)
2007: McCahon Art Residency, Titirangi, New Zealand (July–September)

(Self –funded international research:
2009: Kathmandu-Nepal with a NZ art teacher at the “English school”
2007: New York –lower east side (February-March)
2006: Europe and Morocco, research and drawing


International Exhibitions

2009: Takt Kunstprojektraum studio group show Berlin 2009
2009: New York International Outsider Art Fair, New York, USA, January 9th–11th Fountain art fair-New York (NZ art agent stall)
2008: I.S.C.P studio group show, New York , USA
2006: ***bluetenweiss anonymous drawing project, Berlin, Germany, (group show), December 2006 ongoing contributions including Art basil 2009
2006: Camden Gallery, London, United Kingdom, (group show), December
2003: Newcontemporaries Gallery, Sydney, Australia, Set Fire to Self—Drown (solo show), February 13th–March 9th 2003
2002: Stephen McLaughlan Gallery, Melbourne, Australia, Unutterable Loud Obviousness (solo show), August 2002


Solo Regional Gallery Exhibitions

2010: The Suter Art Gallery–Te Aratoi o Whakatû, Nelson, ‘Witness’ selected survey
(April - June)
2009: Waikato cotemporary art award finalist 2009 (September)
2009: Tauranga Public Gallery, ‘Surface Tension’ (July)
2009: Sarjeant Gallery–Te Whare O Rehua, Whanganui, ‘The Light’ (March–June)
07-08: Lopdell House Gallery, Waitakere City, ‘Ghost Guest Host: Loved Fuckt Killd Eatn’’ (December 2007– February 2008)
2007: Dunedin Public Art Gallery, ‘Maker’ (June–July)
2007: Centre of Contemporary Art, Mair Gallery, Christchurch, ‘Giants Saints Monsters’ (June)
2006: Ashburton Art Gallery, ‘God and Death’ (July–September)
2006: Left Bank Gallery, Greymouth, ‘Rise’ (May)
2005: Te Manawa Gallery, Palmerston North, ‘Rise’ (October)
2005: Eastern Southland Gallery, Gore, ‘Rise’ (March)
2003: Left Bank Gallery, Greymouth, Rugged Individual (April)
2000: Centre of Contemporary Art, Christchurch, [large works], (May)
1999: Left Bank Gallery, Greymouth, ‘Vortex Boy—Living with Ghosts’, (August)
1999: Centre of Contemporary Art, Christchurch, [works on paper], (May)
Selected Solo Dealer Gallery Exhibitions

2010: Mark Hutchins Gallery, Wellington, ‘other-cide’ (May)
2009: PaperGraphica, Christchurch, ‘Recent drawings from Nepal and Berlin’
2009: Bath Street Gallery, Auckland, ‘hapu contraction’ (May)
2009: Mark Hutchins Gallery, Wellington, ‘The Light’ (March)
2008: PaperGraphica, Christchurch, ‘New York: Works on Paper’ (October)
2007: Mark Hutchins Gallery, Wellington, ‘Qi Gong Miniatures’ (December)
2007: PaperGraphica, Christchurch, ‘Drawings: Works on Paper’ (October)
2007: Bath Street Gallery, Auckland, ‘Rise’ (June–July)
2007: Lyttleton Port Gallery, Christchurch (March)
2006: Milford Gallery, Dunedin, ‘Ancient’ (August)
2005: Milford Gallery, Dunedin, ‘Start Up’ (March)
2005: Bath Street Gallery, Auckland, ‘Giants Saints Monsters’ (December)
2004: Temple Gallery, Dunedin, ‘Rise’ (November)
2004: Tatton Gallery, Nelson, ‘One Eyed Night’ (September)
2004: Arthouse Gallery, Christchurch, ‘Catalist’ (May)
2003: Bath Street Gallery, Auckland, ‘New Works’ (November)
2003: Temple Gallery, Dunedin, ‘Set Fire to Self—Drown’ (May)
2003: Arthouse Gallery, Christchurch, ‘Fault line Graduate’ (May)
2002: Number Six, Lyttleton, Christchurch, ‘Small Works’ (September)
2002: Arthouse Gallery, Christchurch, ‘Like It Matters!’ (March)
2001: Arthouse Gallery, Christchurch, Vulnerable: Ego Commodity, (May)
2001: Satellite Gallery and Higher Trust Arts Advocacy Group, Dunedin (March)
2000: Walrus Gallery, Wellington, (September)
1999: Moray Gallery, Dunedin, ‘Delirious’ (September)
Touring Group Exhibitions
2007: Wallace Art Awards touring exhibition: Aotea Centre, Auckland;
New Dowse Gallery, Lower Hutt, Wellington
2006: National Portrait Award touring exhibition (Shed 11, Wellington), April 2006
2003: Wallace Art Awards touring exhibition: Aotea Centre, Auckland;
New Dowse Gallery, Wellington.
2003: NCC Art Awards Second Thoughts touring exhibition.
2000: Wallace Art Awards touring exhibition: Aotea Centre, Auckland;
New Dowse Gallery, Lower Hutt, Wellington.

Selected Group Exhibitions

2006: Milford Gallery, Dunedin, ‘Object’ (July- August)
2006: Mark Hutchins Gallery, Wellington, with Richard Lewer and Scott Kennedy
(June –July)
2006: Cleveland Living Arts Centre, Dunedin, ‘Large Art’ (February)
2005: SoCA Gallery, Christchurch, ‘Dorian Gray Invitational’ (August)
2005: 64zero3 Gallery, Christchurch, ‘Between Warhead and Warhorse’
with Scott Flanagan (June)
2002: Temple Gallery, Dunedin, with works by Colin McCahon and Ralph Hotere, (September)
2000: Blue Oyster Gallery, Dunedin, with ceramicist Jim Cooper (March)
1999: SoCA Gallery, Christchurch, ‘Miniatures’ (November)
1999: Robert McDougal Art Annex, Christchurch, ‘Gruesome’ (April)
Selected Collections
Nova Arts Trust, London, United Kingdom
New Contemporaries, Sydney, Australia
Wallace Arts Trust, New Zealand
Hocken Collection, University of Otago, New Zealand
Christchurch Art Gallery–Te Puna O Waiwhetu collection, Christchurch. New Zealand
Palmerston North Public Gallery–Te Manawa, New Zealand
Eastern Southland Gallery, Gore, New Zealand
Sarjeant gallery Whanganui collection
Miscellaneous
2009: x.o.genesis, animations for short film in collaboration with film-maker Rowan Wernham,
2006: Arc Café, Dunedin, photography show (February)
2005 Temple Gallery, Dunedin, curated Mixed Blessings miniatures exhibition,
(December 2005 -January 2006)
2002 New Zealand Fashion Industry Show, New York, USA, hand-painted T-Shirts
in collaboration with Tanya Carlson (November)

Monograph Publications
2010 ‘Witness’, selected diary mediation drawings on show at Suter Gallery, Nelson. (May)
2009 ‘Hapu Contraction’, collaboration with David Eggleton
2009 Collaborative poetry/drawing booklet with auckland performer “Tourettes”
2009 ‘Light works’, exhibition catalogue of Whanganui works at Mark Hutchins Gallery, Wellington
2009 ‘The Light’ Wanganui catalogue post Tylee cottage residency.
2008 ‘New York: Works on Paper’, exhibition catalogue published in conjunction with PaperGraphica, Christchurch
2008 ‘Ghost Guest Host: Loved Fuckt Killd Eatn’, exhibition catalogue published
in conjunction with Lopdell House Exhibition. Essays by Scott Flanagan and David Hall.
2007 ‘With Drawn Doodle’, a selection of 7 years of sketchbook doodles
2007 ‘Maker’, exhibition catalogue published in conjunction with Dunedin Public Art Gallery exhibition. Essay by Justin Paton, Curator of Contemporary Art, Dunedin Public Art Gallery
2005 ‘Giants, Saints and Monsters’, 140 page fully illustrated catalogue with accompanying DVD of studio process. Essay by Chris Knox.
Survey Publications

2009 ‘Seen this Century - 100 New Zealand artists since 1999’ Contemporary survey publication by Warwick Brown

2007: ‘Look This Way’, New Zealand art writers on New Zealand artists;
contemporary survey by Sally Blundell


Representation


Mark Hutchins Gallery
216a Willis Street, Wellington, New Zealand
www.mhgallery.co.nz
e-mail: mark@mhgallery.co.nz
Telephone: +64 4 385 9300


PaperGraphica
192 Bealey Ave, Christchurch, New Zealand
www.papergraphica.co.nz
Telephone: +64 3 366 8487




Testimonials


Justin Paton, Curator of Contemporary Art, Dunedin Public Art Gallery
‘... provoking, imploring, confessing ... he delivers a grungy retort to the clean-lined look of much recent art inspired by the virtual space of the computer screen ... Should we feel daunted by this chaos [...o]r marvel at the vitality and moments of unexpected beauty to be found within it?’

Chris Knox, in Look This Way: New Zealand Writers on New Zealand Artists
‘... a great big flatulent belch of fresh air amongst all the tight-sphinctered, deodorised boys and girls of the accepted national art world. ... off-kilter and threatening but always sumptuously, gloriously beautiful.’

John McDonald, art writer for the Sydney Morning Herald
‘...a hyper-literate, passionate imagination ... draws, paints and writes with an intensity that makes one think of Van Gogh, or perhaps Antonin Artaud ... a viral outbreak of signs and symbols, a splattering of cosmic graffiti, built up layer upon layer ... visionary landscapes, reminiscent of the teeming vistas of Bosch or Breugel.’

David Eggleton, New Zealand Listener, July 5th 2003
‘beautiful, harsh and weirdly heroic ... Scorched, soaked and scavenged, Robinson’s paintings are a testimony to modern life as a chapter of accidents, where menace mingles with grief, and aggression with abjection.’

T. J. McNamara, New Zealand Herald, November 19th 2003
‘The impressive achievement of these big canvases puts Robinson in the forefront of New Zealand artists ... powerful terrains ... great force ... the intensely personal expression of dark, turbulent emotion ... he has the potential to be one of our most gripping painters.’

Dr. Jennifer “Ginger” Knowlton, editor of Divide: Creative Responses to Contemporary Social Questions, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA
‘... subtle, poetic, meditative investigations of the nature of being within the contemporary world. [...] Response to Robinson’s work, here in the States, has been a rare mixture of awe and warmth.’

Bridie Lonie, writer and Head of School of Art, Otago Polytechnic
‘Painting’s inherent orderliness is both problem and salvation: in this sort of work, the field is opened up, disorder created and order regained. ... a delightful drawer.’

Roger Boyce, Art New Zealand, Summer 2005 (117)
‘It is a visually stunning and accomplished journeyman work ... potentially formidable gifts ... Robinson’s commitment to practice and ferocious level of production is admirable ...’

Dan Chappell, Art News New Zealand, Spring 2005
‘... a new talent ... the embodiment of the driven artist ... The wide sweep and energetic intensity of his recent work means he defies categorisation. ... Critics have mentioned names like Schnabel, Kiefer and Basquiat—but [...] it’s clear Robinson’s art is very much his own.’

Mark Amery, Dominion Post, June 30th 2006
‘... Robinson’s abstract works can create a bodily response, the impression that an emotional vein has been located and opened within the compressed matter of all things .’


Robyn Peers, The Christchurch Press, October 17th 2007
‘... enormously satisfying ... Basquiat, Kiefer, de Lautour, Peter Robinson; many artists are suggested as influences [...] but James Robinson is quite clearly his own artist and [...] has continued to develop his individual style.’

Margaret Duncan, The Christchurch Press, May 2004
‘... striking in its brutal physicality ...’

Peter Entwistle, Otago Daily Times, 2003
‘... a new and vital force in the tradition of Colin McCahon, James K. Baxter and Tony Fomison .... James Robinson's [work] is authentic. It shocks because it really hurts...’

Helen Watson White, Sunday Star Times, May 19th 2002
‘I was transfixed [...] by the extraordinarily positive force of its negative energy ... even the most abstract [work] is alive.’

Warren Feeney, The Christchurch Press, February 1997
‘... slovenly refreshing ... too loud, hazardous, and personal to ignore ... a reminder of why artists take up their brushes in the first place...’

---------------------------------------------------------

"the Light’ by David Hall, New Zealand Listener, May 9th 2009

After a string of artist residencies in New York and New Zealand, James Robinson is squatting in a disused grainstore in Whanganui, painting and wondering what to do next.
It is a vast space, rented out for a pittance when he began the Tylee Cottage residency in mid-2008. Light and wildlife pour in through its unpaned windows. Its corrugated iron roof ticks frantically when the sun comes out. The white planks of the ceiling are stained with tea-coloured rust, and rows of bird-shit line the floor beneath the beams that span overhead.
The ambience is not unlike the artworks that Robinson has been making there. He arrived in Whanganui to begin the Tylee Cottage residency, the results of which constitute The Light. The paintings are a distillation of their surroundings, almost camouflaged amidst the studio’s paint splatters, wood splinters, loose bricks and lost belongings.
“I’m a scavenger and an opportunist,” says Robinson. “I work with what I’ve got, where I am. Every time is different. Like the Whanganui logo, ‘Discovery is the journey’.”
On the white walls of Whanganui’s Sarjeant Gallery, however, the paintings are jarring, antagonistic, like overgrown cultures on a sterile laboratory bench. Torn and scorched, their massive canvases are stuck with thick worms of white paint, deflated sacs of resin, coarse sutures of woollen yarn, and mandalas of nails.
“I like big work,” he says, “because when a sensation overwhelms us, you are in that world, rather than looking at a world. Sometimes with my work I don’t know when to stop, because—y’know—when is a cloud finished?”
Robinson is a painter of effects, captivated by the possibilities of his materials. Blades of grass, black sand, and river pebbles are swamped by acrylic paint, as is a slew of domestic detritus: matches, washers, buttons, beads, plastic toys, loose change, old 45s, circuit boards, a spanner, a handsaw, a broken table leg, a shattered pane of glass, and a post-it note from a friend which invites the artist around for quiche that afternoon.
There is a revelatory spirit at work, a willingness to expose the process, to show the tools of the trade trapped in the painting. It extends to his mind too: Robinson wants to show you how he thinks. He scribbles messages and declarations, auto-criticisms and self-help notes; and gives license to more subliminal impulses, indulging a Gestaltian urge to find faces and figures in the static: ghouls, goblins, mountains and thunderheads.
The canvases are like the tanned hides of endangered civilisations, like tikis or totems, made by a white man unsettled by the memories of the land (Robinson describes Whanganui as “a cultural war zone, a racial genocide point”).
Yet where Robinson’s earlier work was mostly monochromatic, its atmosphere spanning from wintery desolation to frenzied brutality, there is now a profusion of colour, an expansion of his emotional palette. The Light retains Robinson’s usual onslaught, his sensory excess; but emerging through the smog and grey scud is a flush of rusty reds and muted magenta, aquamarine and azure.
“I want to give the most intense experience I know how to do,” he says. “In the past, that was more turbulent and negative, and these days it’s more salubrious, joyous and uplifting. The work has become more alive.”

Robinson had messy beginnings. Born in Christchurch in 1972, he had a schizophrenic and largely absent father, a precocious descent into drugs and booze, and suffered the suicide of his only sibling, Martin, aged 24. What followed was an equally messy recovery, a rocky road of psych wards, AA programmes (he’s been teetotalled since 1993), binge eating, and alternative remedies (“I went to a new age hippy and did rebirthing, and tripped out like Jesus.”)
Of course, art-making was his primary therapy, and he practised it with due fervour. (Output has never been a problem for Robinson—knowing when to stop is the lesson he’s always learning.) Based in Dunedin from 1998 until late 2007, he has exhibited abundantly through dealers and regional galleries around the country.
Given his intensely personal approach to art, it is unsurprising that, to some extent, his artwork mirrors his nature. He is grandiose, expressive and well worried, much of this fuelled by a ferocious commitment to honesty. It makes him incapable of white lies or tactful silences, makes him capable of shooting himself in the foot when it’s already in his mouth, and makes him unsparingly self-critical. And in true yin-yang fashion, his quirks have their counterweights: he is boisterous yet reclusive, self-absorbed yet considerate, frugal yet generous, insecure yet philosophically assured.
He’s also far calmer, far steadier than he used to be. He eats better, tramps regularly, and practises qigong daily. His recent successes haven’t appeased him, but they have tempered the jagged edge of his ambition.
“I’m the kind of artist that’s a journey of the wounded healer,” he says. “I carry a large bundle of post-colonial guilt towards my place here, and I’m turning that guilt, which is unnecessary and unproductive, into a positive force of growth. It’s important to be critical of the culture that birthed us, and ourselves as the perpetuators of that culture, rather than being just a big happy hippy.”
These concerns were sharpened by his residency in New York in early 2008.
“There’s a real confusion about identity that I’ve always walked with,” he says. “But I felt more like a South Pacific artist after being [in New York], and felt more permission to be that.
“Art is a communal record of a collective impulse,” he continues. “Every artist is an MP for their particular community.”
As for now, he is contemplating his next move—Berlin? Waitakere? Whanganui?—and, as always, creating new work.
“I’ve always been aware of my own mortality,” he says. “The good side of this is that I question who I am, why I am, where I am, and what I’m doing with my life. I’m willing to make a lot of embarrassing mistakes, to be a student out loud in service of the spirit of art. My life is a symptom of the universe.”


About the author: David Hall is a freelance writer and political theorist. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand, and is moving shortly to Oxford University, England, to read for the DPhil in Politics.


David Hall



------------------------------------------------------------




"review"
By Mark Amery Courtesy of The Dominion Post

Just up the road at Mark Hutchins Gallery James Robinson’s enormous wall sculptures are also beginning more to resemble landscapes with shifting perspectives, following recent residencies in New York and Wanganui. These can move in a glance between aerial topography of the fissures and ruptures of the earth, to zoom in on the matted build up of garbage half-buried in the earth, and zoom out again to architectural structures built up into the air.

While Robinson’s work has sometimes been suffocatingly introspective in the past in its post-punk existential angst, there is a wider, more powerful humanistic lens in operation here, with hope contained in the blossoms of Renaissance colour. While many of the smaller works remain confused expressionistic fragments to me (they have none of the cohesion or engagement with the world the often made comparison to Anselm Kiefer might suggest), the two large sculptural works here animate the violence of our relationship with the earth dramatically and beautifully. More of Robinson’s recent large work is on display at the Sarjeant Gallery in Wanganui until June 7.

Formed land, Louise Purvis, Bowen Galleries, until 4 April
Light Works, James Robinson, Mark Hutchins Gallery, until 18 April






-----------------------------------------------------------



James Robinson
MAKER

justin paton -duendin public gallery contemporary curater. nz

James Robinson is well known to Dunedin and national audiences for turbulent, densely worked paintings in which the self and the world are constantly tussling. In his works from the early 2000s, webs of psychological pictograms compete for every spare inch of the canvas surface with outbursts of hand-painted text – provoking, imploring, confessing.

Maker feels like something new for Robinson. In this show for the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, he lets his materials do more of the talking than ever before, with results that complicate the common idea of his art as straightforwardly ‘Expressionist’. Robinson’s trademark cries and proclamations are still present, but you have to hunt for them amidst a surge of sheer stuff – a tumble of objects that includes shattered bottles, paint-pot lids, scissors, rope, firewood, and bathroom tiles, all held in place by gloopy white acrylic that is itself scarred and textured. Even the canvases are scavenged objects of a sort – older paintings that have been cut up and stitched back together like Frankenstein’s monster.

Putting broken and lowly things in a pristine gallery is Robinson’s way to get us wondering about value – about what is ‘waste’ and what is worth our attention. It’s an approach that goes back to assemblage artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Don Driver, veteran scavengers and transformers of society’s spare parts. But the questions it raises are especially pressing today, when consumer objects are sold more aggressively and in greater quantities than ever before. Pitting himself against the smooth tasteful surfaces of this ‘designer world’, Robinson thrusts us into a realm of broken forms and unstable materials – a world that is materially ‘poor’ but rich in energy. In the process, he delivers a grungy retort to the clean-lined look of much recent art inspired by the virtual space of the computer screen.

These are landscape paintings, but of an intense and unusual kind. Where conventional landscape paintings usually offer long views out to a stable horizon, Robinson turns our gaze earthwards. With their crusty, evidence-rich surfaces, the paintings suggest archaeological cutaways, views into the surface of the earth. We see bits and pieces of the early twenty-first century, but altered so they resemble fragments of a long-gone civilization, corroded and impacted by time and geological pressure. The colours here are the colours of earth, oil, rust and mud. And by mounding some of the paintings with perishable fragments of the landscape, such as grass clippings, he provides us with an especially vivid reminder that artworks themselves change and perish over time.

The title offers a clue to Robinson’s drama of destruction and creation. Does the ‘maker’ of the title refer to the artist himself, as he works away at his surfaces? Or does it evoke the presence of some greater force churning away behind the chaotic world of these works? Should we feel daunted by this chaos, which often looks like an aftermath of some kind? Or marvel at the vitality and moments of unexpected beauty to be found within it? Robinson leaves the questions open, and in the process ensures that we viewers also play a crucial part as makers of these works.

All works are 2007 and mixed media, including rope, glue, glass, cut grass, acrylic, oil, enamel, ceramic, paper, wool, thread, pen, nails, sand, wood, plastic and found objects on canvas
-----------------------------------------------------------

Une Chance de Trop Scott Flanagan and James Robinson at 64zero3
Roger Boyce
Art New Zealand, Number 117/Summer 2005?006

I am an artist and I nail my pictures together.
Kurt Schwitters to Raoul Hausmann
At least since Schwitters built his Hannover Merzbau and El
Lissitzky his Berlin Proune
aum painters have regularly elbowed
their way past the boudns of fictive space and into the world
of things. Early Modernist motivation for painterly incursion into
three-dimensional space was chiefly two-fold. Russian
Constructivists and artists of the influential De Stijl movement
saw dimensional investigation as a calculated means of moving
(aestheticaly argued) ideological advocacy beyond painting’s
established boundaries, and into public space.
Another succession of materially innovative painters, including
Schwitters, Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni
were more interested in extracting (for its intrinsic associative
and emotive baggage) tangible fragments of the real world?
relocating the selected fractional elements inside the formal
boundaries of painting, to build the argument of the work itself.
These related, but contrarily disposed, cool and warm ‘schools?
dedicated to the investigation of materiality in painting, continue
to the present. Contemporary examples can be found in the
contrasting work of artists Richard Artschwager and Anselm
Kiefer. The respectively gelid ratiocinative and melodramatically
allusive work of these aesthetically diametric practitioners,
perfectly exemplifies the double branch of an age-old, materials
oriented, visual lineage. Similarly, the materially informed
paintings of Scott Flanagan and James Robinson, recently
exhibited together at Christchurch’s 64zero3, revisit this well
trod but productive companion track.
Much has been written and said, of late, about James Robinson.
Most of the writing has focused, unfortunately, on the artist
himself—comparing Robinson to stereotypically self-destructive
art world caricatures of Vincent Van Gogh, Colin McCahon, and
Jean-Michael Basquiat. The is nothing the domesticated art
spectator loves more than to watch, from the comfort of home,
a wild-man in freefall. And if the work, of the artist in question,
theatrically evidences the forces of his own undoing—well, so
much the better.
Once collected, the artist’s paintings can (pre or posthumously)
serve as titillating souvenirs of the artist-as-spectacle, and
stand as a visible measure of its owner’s liberality and
comparative normality. This unsound social and economic
contract holds no real long-term benefit for artists. And it is a
doubly tragic compact if the artist demonstrates potentially
formidable gifts, as is clearly the case with Robinson.
Robinson makes bodily-scaled, emotionally cathartic paintings
that take full advantage of rude processes and relocated
materials. Like Burri, Fontana and Yves Klein, before him,
Robinson burns, punctures, cleaves, slices, and tears at his
tarpaulin canvases until they are a visual shambles. After
physical violation of the surfaces the artist employs nails and
thread to imperfectly suture the lips of his paintings?wounds.
Conversely, Scott Flanagan thoughtfully (albeit eccentrically)
joins industrial material—such as pigmented colsed cell foam,
asphalt, raw plywood and lead sheet (among other things) into
volumetrically flattened, modestly scaled, puzzle-like
Une Chance de Trop Scott Flanagan and James Robinson at 64zero3
Roger Boyce
Art New Zealand, Number 117/Summer 2005?006
compositions. Unlike Robinson’s current paintings Flanagan’s
slight bas-reliefs are overtly figurative. Like sitters in classical
portraiture, Flanagan’s silhouetted generic figures are stiff, cold
and mute in their shallow tray-like wooden frames.
In the last six years James Robinson’s paintings have done
everything except sit still. His early works drew liberally from
the high dudgeon iconography of latter-day punk and hardcore
fringe culture—filtered through his apparent, but stylistically
submerged, familiarity with art historical antecedents. It would
be fair to speculate that, early on, Robinson came across artists
who spoke to his condition—artists along the lines of Otto Dix,
George Grosz, Egon Schiele, and the unschooled and
institutionalized artists apotheosized by Jean Dubuffet’s
advancement of L’Art Brut.
Like the original champions of Art Brut, Robinson pits himself
strategically against the reigning academy. He is, by all evidence,
sui generis but he has been looking. It is apparent from his
paintings that Robinson has been incorporating notable visual
ways and means - and taking heart from the aesthetic
condonation afforded him by historic familiars.
The best teacher is the studio itself and Robinson’s commitment
to practice and ferocious level of production is admirable. He
has churned out thousands of drawings and scores of ambitious
paintings in a relatively short career.
Scott Flanagan, by contrast, is a ruminator. His production, while
sparse by comparison, is densely knotted in cerebration.
Flanagan’s selection of materials and measures has less to do
with any potential associative value that with their possibility
for disassociation and emotional distance. Flanagan recycles
materials and images from show to show. A femur and skeletal
foot that served as the fourth leg of a wooden table?supporting
a thick asphalt silhouette of New Zealand) in Flanagan’s Physics
Room installation—Dr. Don or how I learned to stop worrying
and love Helen—shows up in two phographic images hung
with paintings in his current exhibition.
In one self-portrait (Double Entendre) the artist has the reused
bony foot shoved into his clenched mouth. In another image
(Pro Bono Publico) the black-hooded (¤ la Abu Gharib) artist
stands and faces the camera, wearing the familiar fleshless
leg-bone and foot, like a macabre prosthetic. Flanagan sports
a T-shirt reading ‘Terra Wrist?and maintains precarious balance
with a flimsy stick. The artist’s rebus-like works are chancy
balancing acts, enterprises that play out in shifting twilight
between the work’s?obscurantist images, obfuscating word-play,
and the flat-footedness of his undertandable but taciturn
materials.
The figures in Flanagan’s current bas-relief portraits are
rectilinearly transcribed and awkwardly worked up in
unprepossessing construction materials. Painted after pro forma
artist-bio-type snapshots of Flanagan in various guises—the
originating photos concocted for a catalog, which accompanied
a ‘group?exhibition ‘curated?by Flanagan at Christchurch’s CoCA
gallery. The fictional aftists—Ann Sagan, Alan Lacan, Las Soln,
Ngo Tan Tsan, Taf Aston, and Stan Long—were actually the
artlessly disguised Flanagan.
For the aforementioned exhibition, titled, Looking After My
Friends and Influencing People, Flanagan invented multiple
personas (along the lines of Rose Selavy or Lionel Budd), giving
each artist-personality a contrived biograph and a pseudo-anagrammatic-
like-moniker, derived from the artist’s full given
name—Scott Alan Flanagan. Familiarity with this artist’s ongoing
body of work sets up a reverbeant succession of potential
associations that are quickly distanced from any explicit meaning,
by subsequent and purposefully perverse disassociation—via
material transmutation and oblique reiterative ideation—making
Flanagan’s past production, through to his recent ‘paintings? a
continuous, albeit fractured, hall of mirrors. Continuing in this
manner for years, the artist sets up a disorienting self-reflective
passage, that moves one haltingly, both backward and forward
in Flanagan’s slipstream of creative time.
James Robinson’s strongest early works (exemplified by his tour
de force diptych Raw Pwer) were made of collaged aggregates
that teemed with small persons. Multitudes of tiny heads were
stirred in with legions of Lilliputian bodies and body parts—all
awash in a sea of logorrheic text. Seen from afar this mass of
benighted humanity provided a full range of descriptive value,
adding up (tonally) to monumental portrait heads of the artist
and his deceased brother.
As Robinson’s paintings shed their figurative inhabitants—still
evident in the artist’s cornucopian outpourings of drawing (to
which an entire salon style wall at the 64zero3 exhibition was
devoted)—he turned increasingly to raw material for
psychological evocation. Faux-naif figures (recalling Tony de
Latour’s afflicted and addicted actors) wandered away from the
painter’s canvases. The haxily ambiguous and indeterminately
atmospheric grounds (billows of smoke and veils of earthy
washes)—which hosted the despairing and haunted denizens?
firmed up into uninhabited landscape-like grounds. In his shift
from figurative to geologically non-objective Robinson deployed
transitional, vertical, totemic elements conjured up with vigorous
perpendicularly brushed passages and erect nigrous voids?
echoed by rudely stitched vertical lacerations whose upright
bristly margins acted as stand-ins for absent human frames.
As if in dispositional opposition, Flanagan’s six recent
Transportrait paintings (all 930 mm x 630 mm) while
anthropomorphically occupied, are hardly human. The figures?
hard, silhouetted edges are a result of perverse anti-aesthetic
manufacture. Figure and ground are bth raggedly cut collages
of purposefully uninspiring stuff. Foam, plywood, and lead sheet
puzzle-pieces are in-filled here and there with asphalt and
plastizote, as in Transportrait as Ann Sagan—one of Flanagan’s
more optically engaging works.
The industrially speechless compositions of the Transportrait
series are limited in chroma to factory yellow, gray, and
institutional white. Retinally abrasive passages of grainy asphalt,
raw plywood, and stippled gray plastizote provide textural breaks
from u
elieved planar sameness. Flanagan’s physical re-imaging
of his fictionally authored ‘artist’s collective?results in an
inventively paradoxical alloy of unornamented truth-in-material
(what you see is what you get) joined to a false conceptual
underlayment of fancifully fabricated origination.
James Robinson’s six newish paintings are all-of-a-piece, inteerms of incorporated materials –aggregates of coal, thickets
of sticks and straws, stitched thread, whitewash, and smoke–and
at times scatterings of inexplicably vunerable and heartbreakingly
human clothes buttons. The smallest work (1010mm x 890mm)
Holy Mountain (incest knife fight) 2004, is almost wholly
dismembered–the gaping cavities in its savaged face have been
frantically stitched and stuffed with broken twigs. The artist’s
final whitewashing of the painting’s blackened corpus unifies
the picture’s flayed skin and lends an otherwordly lustre to the
all-too-physical carnage.
In two works, Birth and Qi, unequivocally pronounced landscape
horizons (in the painting’s lower foregrounds) demarcated by
dark agglomerated anthracite bottoms, contrasted with the
painting’s blindingly blanched upper stories(denoting illuminated
sky) risk becoming cavalierly literal. Isolated islands of glued
on straw and broken crockery draw the paintings dangerously
close to the habitat of an estimable 500-pound Teutonic bear
named Anshelm Kiefer (straw), and within the contagion zone
of the scabrous Julian Schnabel (broken plates). Although the
ravenous and omnivorous Robertson’s own plate is overflowing
with rich fare he tries, with Birth and Qi, to eat something bigger
than his own head.
The exhibition’s most auspicious work, and reportedly Robinson’s
most current, is the monumental (1660 x 2780mm) diptych, Inner
Eye/Overview, 2005. Comparatively introspective in tone, the
painting bears mute witness to hard won gains in studio and
in life. It is a visually stunning and accomplished journeyman
work–from its first macroburst of blinding white to its finely
forged detail–it stands to mark the beginnings of Robinson’s
maturity as a painter.
The wall-sized ash-white work exudes a funeral air akin to Piero
Manzoni’s kaolin washed and timelessly sepulchral Achromes.
As rubble strewn as Manzoni’s rocky facades, but more
labyrinthine in surface incident, the painting rewards extended
viewing with illimitable optical unfolding. The diptych’s deft
symphonic grace notes include a subtle roseate-brown blush,
near the painting’s dark eye, that reads as incipient bruising,
the post-conflagration carbon under-painting, that glints slightly
and malevolently through the ghostly whitewashed surface, the
tightly gathered stitchery that binds and puckers the margins
of the painting’s scars, and the convincingly variegated scale
of the picture plane’s tortuous rubble-strewn field-of-fire,
Beginning assertively with the image’s crepuscular, light-sucking,
velvet-holed oculus, and working down to the delicate tracery
of its linear architectonic notation–fashioned of fragilely sewn
thread–Robinson’s sure-handed orchestration of material, scale
and reticent color results in an eye-expanding masterwork that
speaks promisingly of things to come.

-------------------------review----------------------------

J.M.C (christchurch city mission night watchman)
Giants Saints Monsters Book

James Robinson’s studio is an alchemist’s cauldron. Charred,
sooty, crusty, scratched. It’s Antihandyandy. The nest where a
black tornado stirs in her sleep. There are coffee cups in the
detritus whose stains and strata of dried grinds speak dark ages
and medieval torture machines. None of it is affectation. It is
the exhaust of his industry.
The place is large and cold, a kind of ex-engineering ware-house
something or rather. It is a big manky woollen beany
steelcap industrial hole for cranking out char grilled art. It’s the
kind of place flame throwers find romantic.
Out of its squelta of torn magazines, squashed tubes, dried
glue, coagulant, tape, tins, thucked brushes, branches, rust,
nails, stand The Paintings.
The Big Bad Babies, screaming, complaining, staining their
undies, crying for mommy, threatening murder and bawling like
outsized delinquent brats demanding to be heard.
They chronicle the first trans-national-anti-globalisation riot
by the world’s A.D.D. sufferers.
They personify zombie spastic jerks.
They smell like a used electric chair.
The artist’s claim to be sampling and mixing information is
inaccurate, He is in fact chomping and mincing. He uses his
media in a similar way. The resulting liquific skagg is more the
bio-flora of a cannibal’s gut than any tame post-mod pussyfooting.
I just dunno how it’s gonna go with your curtains darling.
2
so??..after the photo shoot in leather pants with the
SLR?..after the interview and rave review in Art News??.after
the monologue unwinds till the bones of a whisper poke
through?and your culture ferments into a heady brew?we will
stumble out into that great intersection that is the world and
scream..’cause..the herd must be heard?.but..really..I only want
a hug..a hug..and a great big love. I don’t need intelligent moving
from head to head till we ALL PUFFED UP?paying tolls to key
holes to get let in?I don’t want to kidnap fat cats or blow up a
bus?.i only want a love..i only want a little hug.
3
Because when the pie in the sky fell, it fell on one of J.R’s
canvases.
Now he doesn’t know what to do?He sends a message out
to the world. “This is a shocking mess?it’s all over the place
and it’s especially all over me?
He’ll scrape some up and shove it in your face.
“I know..I know?He says,”I’m a fat bastard but what do you
expect.?
Next minute He’s at the kitchen sink..seeking to realign the
ingredients, apply some heat, bake the cake and climb a spindly
ladder of scratched white lines to stick it back up again. There’s
a keen sense of responsibility, an earnest search to find a place
in the scheme of things?but..the pastry burns his fingers and
the content leaks?so?it’s back to the kitchen sink which he tears
from the wall and heaves at the canvas along with the pie in
the sky?”Look I’m sorry?He pleads “I’m only a man, my scrotum
has the texture of a turkey’s neck..what do you expect???.
J.M.C (christchurch city mission night watchman)
Giants Saints Monsters Book
?..you can knock up a sign on cardboard with cheap felt pens,
it can say “coffee one dollar cakes for free?you can walk around
town all day with it nailed to your forehead and still no one
comes to your party.
4
The Pupil asked the Master ”What is Buddha nature?
The Master replied ”Dog shit?
That’s why I’m not a Buddhist.
That’s why James Robinson paints.

-------------------------review----------------------------

Who Killed JR?
Chris Knox
Giants Saints Monsters Book

Off the top of one head to another
First saw James?work in the late ?0s when he submitted
some etchings to a shortlived arts and stuff mag that a bunch of
us were doing at the time. He sent a few photocopies which
sparked our editorial interest so we asked for some originals to
scan, expecting five or six prints.
But no. Instead a vast parcel of corrugated cardboard and
brown tape, graffitied to death and a work of frenzied, pulpy art
in itself appeared on our doorstep and, upon being carefully ripped
open, revealed god knows how many prints, drawings and paintings
on paper.
Clearly the work of a commited and driven artist a˛ for want
of a better word a˛ we were compelled to print a dozen pieces
over two issues of Loose without comment, explanation or any
context other than the surrounding pages. It looked scatalogically,
confrontationally great. I bought two of the filthiest.
First saw James sometime further back when, dressed in a˛
from memory a˛ a capacious kaftan, he whooped and hollered
through one of my South Island gigs, making a monstrous artwork
of his cranky self as irritant and inspiration combined. I liked the
kid’s attitude.
Then I met him in the fine, fine, superfine art context during
his Bath st show in late ?3 where he showed the most consistently
inventive, brutally accomplished set of raw, anguished canvasses
that I have ever seen. The u
elenting quality of these things was
astonishing, humbling and it was no surprise that they all sold.
We bought one (mate’s rates, he’d dedicated it to me and Barbara)
and it graced and raged beautifully at our bedroom wall. Felt
privileged.
Now it’s another show and this is different.
Pulling back from the art game at which he proved himself so
successful, these are no longer mute howls of monochrome
roughage, off-kilter applications and explosions of mixed media
madness, weirdly acceptable to them what choose on a decorative
basis, but a return to his word-choked diatribes that will repel as
many as they will attract.
This is back to a street-bred, editorial approach to visu-al/
intellectual/emotional stimulation. No chance here of missing
the message, these things scream, whisper and growl their import
to ya in a direct, almost didactic fashion. I don’t think we’re
s’posed to do that, we artists. We’re s’posed to let you, the punter,
put yr own make on things with as little help from us as possible,
right? To couch this stuff so enigmatically, so ambiguously, so
subtly that you may make anything of it that you will.
Well, fuck that, sez James, here’s what I’m thinking. Unequiv-ocally
thrust into yr face with all the demure pastel panache of
a WWF beefcake spinebusting mass of ferocious muscle and
spume. Buy this shit at your peril. Hey, you bought McCahon with
his safe-as-houses Christian twaddle and any number of Maori
artists with their sweet ethnic epithets and that other Robinson
with his dainty swastika anarchisms so you can buy this too. It’s
only money.
But can you love it? Can you embrace its rage, horror, grief,
joy, ecstacy and turmoil, there’s the challenge. This ain’t Van
Gogh’s wheatfields, nor even his self-portraits, this is the flesh
of his ear, blood coagulating and attracting flies.
Nah, just kidding, they’re only drawings and paintings.
ONLY drawings and paintings. MERELY art.
Glorified comix, really, as harmless as Goya, Blake, Hogarth,
Grosz, Crumb, Tracey Tawhiao and Anthony Ellison, skilfully made
images wedded to unfiltered verbiage to look good and entertain,
nothing more. Cos art can’t make you think. Only you can make
you think. He said glibly.
But it’s hard to love this stuff that is so obvious. I mean, it’s
Who Killed JR?
Chris Knox
Giants Saints Monsters Book
so OBVIOUS. Wasn’t it better when he was doing huge canvasses,
devoid of verbalised thought, splendid, deep, ravaged and strangely
dignified? Acceptable? Wasn’t this a sign of artistic maturity, that
he’d left his juvenilia behind, that he was gunna let the art world
ease into his work with their suffocating acceptance and their
gorgeous, comforting money? Wasn’t this the James Robinson
we all really wanted, the one who would give us what we want?
Well, yeah, that’s what I thought, I loved this new direction,
his work was the most bloody MAJESTIC stuff I’d ever seen by
a local artist and every one a winner. But, y’know, after proving
he can do this stuff in his - admittedly disturbed - sleep, where
could he go but down that self-defeating, self-referential, mas-turbatory
road to beautiful, pure - and highly commercial - mini-malism?
Like so many before him.
Not good enough. So a˛ BANG a˛ back come the words and
the complex, randomly kaleidoscopic images, clashing, comple-menting
and flying off the page in glotted, fragmentary maximalist
splendour.
This is brave. No, not brave, merely necessary. For the man’s
continuing existence as a person. Not as a “James Robinson?
And he’s augmenting it with his head movies. Literally for the
little bugger attached a camera to his noggin, taking a frame a
second while making these things and showing the process as a
fractured, flickering smorgasboardwalk freakshow filmshow.
Renaissance boy? You bet.
Comix? Videos? What’s he playing at? He’ll never get ahead,
he’s too confusing. Who knows what the unprictable bastard’s
gunna do next?
Well, I dunno but, such is this guy’s abundant, burning energy
and his overpowering need to get his head and heart onto paper
and canvas, I’m sure it’ll be as challenging, deafening, blinding
and empowering as any of this stuff here.
You go, girl.

---------------------------review--------------------------

Southern Men
Dan Chappell
Art News New Zealand, Spring 2005

?Across the railway tracks, hidden in an anonymous
warehouse bounded by panelbeaters, cabinetmakers and indus-trial
dross, is the stygian world of James Robinson. Originally
from Christchurch, Robinson has carved himself a gritty, eyeball-to-
eyeball, no-holds-barred niche in the local art firmament.
He has an Art and Craft Diploma from Hungry Creek, north
of Auckland, attended Otago Polytechnic; performed at fringe
art venues through the 1990s; had more than 50 shows in venues
ranging from cafes and video parlours to the Robert MacDougall
and Bath Street Gallery; exhibited in Greymouth, Sydney, Mel-bourne
and New York.
The stacked up works in his vast studio are uncompromising,
gaunt and spectral ?eight-foot high canvases, which have
been slashed and roughly sutured with six-inch nails, wire or
cord. They are splattered, stained and scored with lumps of
coal, coffee grounds, tea bags, gravel and paint ?all of it
encrusted or oozing down the face of the works.
Critics have mentioned names like Schnabel, Kiefer and
Basquiat ?but on looking at his deft, delicate charcoal sketches
and his intricate stream-of-consciousness sketchbooks, it’s clear
Robinson’s art is very much his own.
The attempts to categorise Robinson as an outsider/art brut
artist have begun and words like “self-contempt? “demons?
“dysfunction?and “self-medication?pepper the reviews of his
work. The ghosts of McCahon, Baxter and Fomison have also been
evoked. There is little doubt a new talent has been identified ?a
sell-out show at his Auckland dealer gallery in 2004 and an upcoming
exhibition at Te Manawa in Palmerston North confirm this.
But trying to compartmentalise James Robinson is doing
him, and those he is compared to, no favours. The wide sweep
and energetic intensity of his recent work means he defies
categorisation.
He is the embodiment of the driven artist, creating on every
surface available in his studio ?walls and notebooks ?twenty
four-seven. The individual groups of work have a visceral hum
but, placed side by side, the dissonance between them is visable.
Robinson himself plays the devil’s advocate, struggling to stop
adding to, painting over, slashing, splashing and extenuating
his monsters.
Preparing for his November exhibition at Bath Street Gallery
in Auckland, James is currently in a multi-media creative swoop.
“I’m wearing a security head-camera, which is taking one
frame per second as I’m creating the works. That footage, sped
up and burned onto disc, will be running at the exhibition ?
showing the creative process in relation to the finished static,?
he says.
He sees himself as a throwback to the 1950s artists ?always
with sketchbook in hand, working on big paintings with no easel
?and he finds Dunedin’s art ethos gives him freedom.
“Here in Dunedin we have this honest working-class artist ethic.
Here I have the psychic space to create. I’m down here to work
but I can still survey the whole art scene. I need to work the country
but based in Dunedin I have this great mental elbow room.”…

-----------------------REVIEW------------------------------------
Giant shocks loaded with emotion
T J McNamara
The New Zealand Hearald, November 9, 2005


Some exhibitions make an initial impact but fade on close
inspection. Others offer dense amounts of material to explore
after the initial whammy.
Two such strong shows this week need long and careful
scrutiny. In one case the meaning is spelled out and explicit.
The other has fine detail to absorb and the meaning is more
oblique.
The larger show, Giants Saints Monsters is by James Robinson
at the Bath Street Gallery until November 26.
The gallery is hung with a couple of dozen big paintings,
mostly hinged to the wall by one side so they swing out aggres-sively
into the viewer’s space. The immediate impression overall
is of violent attack.
Every sort of texture has been vigorously applied to the
paintings.
Their surface is rough with sand and gravel, with pitch,
collage and bits of wood. Most of the paintings have been
slashed and the wounds pinned together with rusty nails or
crudely stitched.
Chris Knox was guest artist at the opening, and the work is
similar in mood to a song such as Squeeze played by his band,
Toy Love.
The work is mostly in brown, black and grey but there are
bright notes of colour where the stitching is vivid red. And there
is red in the shining lining of the slashed wounds.
At one point, one of the many holes is backed by a battered
tin lid which makes a bright jewel when hit by the overhead
lighting.
Covering everything are the messages ?endless lettering,
large and small, on all the paintings.
There is a huge amount of text ?attacks on paedophillia,
families, capitalism, government, politics and religion. Any
target that could possibly be shot at gets a burst, usually of
obscene words.
What pulls all these violent paintings together, as well as
their pitchy colour and raucous messages, is a device that links
their hysterical Expressionism with classical figure painting. In
the best of the paintings is a dramatic large figure or head, or,
in one case, a vast bosom.
These giants and monsters give a unity to individual paintings
and variety to an installation that would otherwise bellow just
one loud, pessimistic note.

---------------------------review--------------------------

Ritualised anger
Fran Dibble

Normally, my reviews are based on artists?work that I have
a long interest in and affiliation with, so I can mull over the work
and figure out what I think. Instinctive reactions haveto be reasoned
and rationalised. But this fortnight snuck around in a whirl and
so I have taken a punt and, with no time to spare, gone to James
Robinson’s exhibition, Rise, in one of the galleries at Te Manawa,
showing until mid-December.
In a sense, this is probably the best way to experience Robinson.
It is artwork that is all about reaction and apprehension. No
amount of imagery on paper prepares you for the works in the
flesh. they photograph badly (by seeing the list of media used in
each work, you can guess this), as they are more or less a monotone
relying on a contrast of textures and surface.
Robinson is a young artist, born in 1972 in Christchurch, with
training at the Otago School of Fine Arts. Otago is where he now
lives and works and somehow he and his work have a Dunedin
flavour to it, where you think of alternate music, and youth. He
has had a packed exhibition history since 1989.
He hit the ground running, from what I read in a novella-sized
account of carefully collated reviews, articles and biographical
information passed on to me.
You get the impression that he is earnest in his ambitions. He
has won the praise of writers whose names ring familiar from
art journals and magazines, but I confess I have ever heard of
him. Can we blame it on the great gulf of the Cook Strait? However,
I think I can still figure out what Robinson is about.
A straight description of the works is that they are canvas
stretched over frames all of a similar size; about 2,5m by 1m ?
so tall and long , but the frame is not square. The misshaping
adds to the sense of disorientation the works are trying to instil.
The canvas is coated with paint mixed with all kinds of grungy
stuff: It looks like rocks, sand and just coagulated, lumpy paint.
Then the canvas is partly destroyed. it is burnt to produce holes
in areas (you can see this by the scorched black of h