Rohan Robinson
Nov 16 - 15 Dec 2024
Rohan Robinson
Art tends to be celebrated for giving form and meaning to a chaotic and disturbingly amorphous world, for its ability to express the inexpressible - to make tangible the most elusive and incomprehensible facets of existence.
This understanding is necessarily limiting: art as pruning shears reducing an unseemly or disturbing wilderness to something tasteful and manageable. Much of the human condition – or the Western condition at the very least – is dedicated to the pursuit of order - our brains hardwired to find patterns and therefore a point to it all, to control what is beyond our control and understanding. This view overlooks the potentiality of being set free in the chaos, to overlook or deliberately spurn pattern, order and reason and for the purpose of art, in the words of Roland Barthe, to ‘un-express the expressible’. According to Barthes, art was not a call giving shape to the void, but an insistence on the void, a rejection of its denial by polite society. This work in this show was originally inspired by what is termed the Stendhal Syndrome, a psychological condition in which confrontation with the sublime in art creates physical and mental distress. The Romantic movement was dedicated to the sublime: the profound feeling evoked by the grandeur and wildness of nature. But perhaps Stendhal Syndrome may be the opposite - the effect of the potentially disturbing and compelling way an artist refuses to impose order over the `sublime’ chaos of existence. Randomania: the inability, or even refusal to see patterns where they do not exist, the rejection of epiphanies of order for the more convincing epiphany of chaos, randomness.
Joan Miro, whose work also inspired this show, was prone to depression and anxiety: art was, by equal measures, a means of conveying what he described as the ‘chaos’ in his mind – unreachable and abstract - as well as a strange and elusive peace that sometimes emerged from the same place. His mental state was much speculated on during his life and even more so after it: his paintings, in their familiarity and strangeness, abstraction and recognisability, stand as a challenge to speculation and over-explanation: a simultaneous expression and `un-expression’.
These paintings took seed from the artist’s journey through and around Miro country. Plenty of order is expressed in the great art of the Habsburgs, but equally there is plenty of deliberate over-explaining, purposeful confusion, radical refusal to express what should be abject. Think of Velasquez and the countless, looping, dizzying perspectives of Las Meninas, El Greco’s gaunt and corpse-blue Christs ghoulish and lurid next to the neat, picturesque crucifixions of before, or Goya’s scenes of the Napoleonic Wars, which refuse the everyday and normative expression of mass violence in newspaper by bringing to the fore the horror, which is basically inexpressible and the foremost feature of any war. His Black paintings may be seen as a feverish fascination with the inexpressible: Goya in a haze of his own Stendhal Syndrome, in the thrall of horrors such as witches and cannibalistic gods, too long neatly expressed in fairy tales and folk stories.
Great art may comfort the disturbed, but it also confuses the sure. The best of art is recognisable and strange at once - a neat countryside dissolves into a haze of green, yellow, blue: man’s ordering of nature for our own purposes side-by-side with the void beneath it all. A painting, like life, is familiar and strange, knowable and mysterious. deliberate order in the face of random chaos, deliberate chaos in the face of random order.
Grace Gardiner
Sales:
Julie Collins - Director gallery@djprojects.net
0417324 795
Free Delivery & Installation
Shipping arranged interstate and Overseas.
21 Morce Ave Sorrento, Victoria, Australia
www.andgalleryaustralia.net & Gallery is part of the djprojects family of art related businesses. www.djprojects.net
1. Mad to Barca #14
Acrylic - Framed
76 x 112 cm
$3,200
2. Mad to Barca #12
Acrylic - Framed
76 x 112 cm
$3,200
$3,200
3. Mad to Barca #32
Acrylic - Framed
76 x 112 cm
4. Mad to Barca #22
Acrylic - Framed
76 x 112 cm
$3,200
5. Never Never Land NT
Acrylic - Framed 112 x 164 cm
$5,500
6. Sketches of Spain
Acrylic - Framed 97 x 1375cm
$3,200
7. Living in a Volcano with Link Wrag
Acrylic Framed
97 x 1380cm
$3,200
76
$3,200
8. Blip on the Landscape
Acrylic - Framed
x 102 cm
9. Hornet Chasing a Strawberry
Acrylic - Framed
97 x 138 cm
$3,000
820
$3,000
10. Start of the Dirt
Acrylic - Framed
x 120 cm
$5,000
11. Swarm, Chartered, Toasters
Acrylic - Framed
97 x 135 cm
82
$3,000
12. End of the Tarmac
Acrylic - Framed
x 120 cm
CV: ROHAN ROBINSON
BORN: GEELONG 1961
Artist - C.V.
STUDY: FINE ART [Painting] DEAKIN UNIVERSITY 1980-82, 88
SOLO SHOWS
1984 GALLERY 612, TOKYO, JAPAN,
1986 RECONNAISSANCE, MELBOURNE
1987 RECONNAISSANCE, MELBOURNE “Littoralism”
1989 TAMURA GALLERY, TOKYO, JAPAN “The Colombian Brothers Alive From Australia”
1990 SING KEN KEN, BALI, INDONESIA
1997 BRIM BRIM, GEELONG FINE ART SCHOOL “Littoralism #3, You’re On or You’re Off or You’re In or You’re Out”
1998 BRIM BRIM, GEELONG FINE ART SCHOOL, “Vortex Tiling and the Bifurcating Chaotic Attractor”
2001 RYRIE STREET GALLERY, GEELONG “Littoralism #5”
2003 BROUGHAM ART SCHOOL, GEELONG “Littoralism #6 – Down to the Endless Sea”
2005 QDOS GALLERY, LORNE, VICTORIA “Littoralism #8 – And a Compass that Doesn’t Point North”
2006 BRIGHTSPACE, ST KILDA, MELBOURNE “Nudot L/S” [NEW DOT LANDSCAPES]
2009 GEELONG ART GALLERY. WEST FROM BROOME
2009 GREEN WOOD GALLERY, MELBOURNE. “Littoralism #10 - Saint George and the Devils’ Elbow”
2010 GREEN WOOD GALLERY, MELBOURNE. “Above to Patjarr”
2013 BOOM GALLERY, Geelong. “60 Days”
2014 Qdos GALLERY, Lorne. “My Life as a Brush”
2015 BOOM GALLERY, Geelong. “Littoralism 015, From the Other Side”
2016 LONE GOAT GALLERY, Byron Bay, “Littoralism”
2018 BOOM GALLERY, GEELONG. “Desire for a Sedentary Personality”
2019. Qdos GALLERY, Lorne
2021. Qdos GALLERY, Lorne, “We Are Hardly Breathing”
2024. Qdos GALLERY, Lorne, “Hierophany, Pareidolia, Apophenia and Randomania”
2024 & Gallery Australia, Sorrento. HPAR2.
GROUP SHOWS
1984 DEAKIN UNIVERSITY – Post Graduate Show
1984 SENDAI INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL, JAPAN- Australian Representative
1986/7/8 RECONNAISSANCE, MELBOURNE
1991 GEELONG REGIONAL GALLERY- Survey Show
1991 MILDURA REGIONAL GALLERY - BROKEN HILL REGIONAL GALLERY
“So Much Water so Close to Home” with Graeme Rowe, Leigh Chiller and Katherine Hattam
1992 BELLS BEACH RIP CURL PRO – “SURFFERING ARTISTS” - ARTISTS THAT SURF with Peter Webb, Peter Rosson, Simon Buttonshaw, Mark Schaller AND Norval Watson.
1999 UNIQUE BEINGS, ZARINAN GURRIE FINE ART w/ Peter Webb, Simon Buttonshaw
2000 MOMENTA, GEELONG FINE ART SCHOOL – The Geelong Fine Art School Collection
2003 QDOS, LORNE, VICTORIA w/ Peter Webb and Ross Gash
2005/6 Whitewash, TORQUAY. Surf Industry arts show
2006 BRIGHTSPACE, ST.KILDA
2006 FLETCHER JONES Geelong Prize, GEELONG GALLERY
2007 GEELONG REGIONAL ARTISTS EXHIBITION - Gordon Institute of Technology
2007 BRIGHTPSACE, ST. KILDA.
2008 BRIGHTSPACE, ST. KILDA
2008 GREEN WOOD GALLERY, LORNE
2010 THE CONVENT GALLERY, DAYLESFORD.
2010 “The Carmichael Project” GEELONG
2012 BRIGHTSPACE, ST. KILDA.
2012 “Landscape Now” BOOM Gallery, Geelong
2012 “Geelong Regional Artists” - Gordon Tafe.
2012 Geelong Contemporary Painting Prize, Geelong Gallery.
2013 “The Carmichael Project 2” – 31 Downstairs, Melbourne.
2014 BOOM GALLERY. “Dog Rocks”
2015 FAD GALLERY, Melbourne, “ROCK OFF” w/ Peter Webb, David Thomas and Graeme Rowe
COLLECTIONS
Artbank
Parliament House Art Collections, Canberra.
DFAT, Canberra
City of Greater Geelong
FOUNDING CHAIR – SURF COAST ARTS
2010-2011 MANAGER OF KAYILI ARTISTS Aboriginal Corporation, Patjarr, Gibson Desert W.A.