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 PICA, Megannity’s subject is rendered in the act of eating an ice cube. His model is his partner, who lives with PICA, an eating disorder that involves eating items not typically considered food and with no nutritional value; for her, eating ice is a means of displacement. The work’s close cropping and sensitive, naturalistic style shed real light on a little-known disorder, yet equally, the composition and the purple, monochromatic palette maintain a surrealism, and a sense of the inexplicable, characteristic of Megannity’s work and the subjects it describes.