Laying Face-Down On the Earth
Art measured against the universe dwindles to dust grains and reverberations in recent works by James Robinson. He makes fables about creation. He is the artist as artificer, on the verge of inventing his own religion, a syncretic mojo-man. And yet his prolific and obsessive output of metaphoric objects, assembled from found vernacular matter, is always in the service of beauty, at once haunting, forbidding, eerie. He just takes the long way round to get there: past the landfills we avert our gaze from, the waste lands that globalisation only recognises as eyesores ripe for redevelopment. Finding beauty in the abject, doing the heavy lifting, getting stuff back to the studio, Robinson is a kind of body builder, the Arnold Schwarzenegger of local painting, uniting disparate materials to bulge under skins of enamel and latex paint.
In November 2019 Robinson held an open studio exhibition in his home, a converted merchant navy hall in Port Chalmers, where he has been based since 2006. The centrepiece of this show of new work was the large (8 metres by 3.5 metres) mural (2019), consisting of eight butted-together panels of flat canvas strips or dangling long scrolls, and created in response to my long poem ‘Teleprompter’. Partly this installation was a, published in 2018 by Otago University Press.
