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 the keepers, Megannity’s source material is a film still from Khraniteli, a Soviet teleplay based on J.R. R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. Khraniteli, broadcast by Leningrad Television in 1991, was thought lost, and rediscovered in 2021; in the keepers, Megannity revives it once again, by translating it to oil paint. While the figure is frozen in place, here, the dynamism of his source is compellingly retained; the effects of low production value (Khraniteli was shot on low-budget videotape) manifest as renegade lines of paint, resembling vibrations, and the figure’s wild eyes are so alive that they appear, like their subject, both absolutely real and disturbingly uncanny.