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.

In on oath, Megannity continues an ongoing preoccupation with still life. The painting, a work of oil on linen, is characterised by a rich, earthy, opulent luminosity – like the Northern European still life tradition from which it draws, it is at once both naturalistic and aestheticised. Yet characteristically, Megannity updates, or disrupts, this tradition: on oath is, in fact, three still lifes, cropped and recomposed into a triptych, a modernisation that feels closer to contemporary means of media manipulation. By reconstituting his source imagery, here, Megannity creates a vivid, ambiguous and internal dissonance within his work that transcends any single set of conventions.