Call of the Void

Workplace is delighted to present Call of the Void, a solo exhibition of recent paintings by Manchester based artist Robin Megannity. The exhibition explores Megannity’s endeavour to hold paradoxical or contrary sentiments within his painting that connect the ubiquitous with the sublime.

L’appel du vide, is a French phrase which literally means “the call of the void,” and describes the widely experienced phenomena of the strong or compelling urge one might feel to jump or fall from a high place, such as from a tall building or precipitously soaring cliff. It is a vision of a dangerous action that appears like a flash across previously calm or disinterested thoughts exposing a shift, or psychological quiver, between the conscious and unconscious mind.

Megannity’s search for simultaneity within his painting finds parallels in such phenomena. Historical techniques and traditions of painting are appropriated and quoted in his work, and the pathos, melancholy and solemnity of Northern European still life paintings are interrupted by references to digital image making. Glitches and ruptures in the framing of his images connect the temporality of the historical source imagery with commonplace contemporary means of media manipulation. Similarly, the anodine and lifeless simulations of computer renderings or product advertising, are imbued with the historical weight and meaning of painting that pulls them out of the virtual and lends them authenticity. Megannity perpetually reframes and recontextualises his source imagery to create an internal dissonance or aberration that pushes his works beyond the seductive beauty of their rendering towards a potent assertion of ambivalent detachment.