Robin Megannity

Robin Megannity imbues his images with the retro appearance of traditional oil paintings. Unusually for a contemporary artist, he makes use of oil paint's illusionistic potential, building up fictional scenarios in fine layers to suggest real-life scenes. He employs a changing cast of actors to pose with apparently meaningful gestures amid an assortment of symbolic props. Muted colours create claustrophobic shadows, and cryptic titles add to an atmosphere of narrative suspense. Megannity’s works operate as glimpses of storylines, petrified into enigmatic yet intriguing mysteries.

I can slip through the gates is a large-scale, life-sized portrait. Here, Megannity works in a technically sophisticated, naturalistic style, with attention to light, tone and form, even as his subject is positioned in the shadows. Characteristically, an unexpected element disrupts an otherwise conventional composition: Megannity’s model holds an inflated rubber glove, resembling a balloon, floating upon a string. Sombre, ominous yet open to play, the mood of the work, like its strange, unexplained interplay of elements, gestures at the paradoxes that, for Megannity, define all painting: intimacy and mystery, tenderness and melodrama, sincerity and artificiality.