| Century Gallery Oct 2-12, 2002 |
 | home |
|
Seconds Away |
Anne Robinson |
|
 |
 |
| Anne Robinson's recent
paintings continue a body of work engaged with the television moment — the
freeze frame. The work focuses on images of wrestlers as well as continuing
with hospital:medical dramas. In addition to dissecting the video image,
and subjecting the fleeting television moment to intense scrutiny, there
is a strand in this body of work which is directly about contemporary
fulfilment of spiritual needs — reflections on the life or death
moment. The wrestling work moves away from fiction and yet is still dealing with the 'constructed' and not the 'real'. As Barthes has said: " …wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles…. a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve." In these new paintings, there is more dynamism and more of the TV screen effect of motion, and yet there is space within the work for reflection on the nature of violence. |
Engaging with the moments in-between when they are extracted from the narrative, TV images taken from even superficially banal mid-evening entertainment become heightened, visceral and, at times, disturbing. Painting captures the dramatic moment, and yet does so quietly, with beautiful texture and light quality — nothing added and yet more than the mundane television experience. Gerhard Richter has suggested that "painting offers something of a universal interest: a statement, a new quality, an advance..." Here, simulated violence becomes beautiful in the blue TV screen light — the surface of the oil paint ironically evocative of many ultra-modern imaging devices and screens. |
|
|
|
