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 some say the end is near, Megannity continues an ongoing preoccupation with still life. The painting, a large-scale work of oil on linen, conveys the solemnity and luminous, self-reflexive grandeur of the Northern European still life tradition on which it draws. It is, at once, a work of heightened realism and artificiality: Megannity’s sensitive, technically sophisticated naturalistic paintwork plays against the innate aesthetic performativity of his subject. This dynamic is heightened by both the radiant fruit’s abundance, literally overflowing from its bowl, and by the vertical line that divides the work in two, a line that subtly, perhaps radically, injects an element of temporality, even fragility, into a seemingly timeless subject.