Eating the Middle

Inspired by the complex and enduring desires to escape the body, ‘Eating the Middle’ is a new series of work that looks for the short circuits between speculative futures and the veiled and murky past.

Robin’s practice is focused on the spaces between seemingly paradoxical sentiments, whether that is between intimacy and detachment, virtual and embodied or natural and synthetic. Painting serves as a perfect stage as it works in a place between sensory object and distant image; it can be both immediate and visceral as well as detached or ambivalent.

The contradiction at play in ‘Eating the Middle’ is that of the obscuring language that links advancing technology with the mysterious, occult and esoteric.The seemingly logical and pragmatic domain of industrial science is haunted by hallucinations, ghosts and fragments of the dark and delirious. Robin’s work follows this thread and picks out themes of metamorphosis, temptation, denial and the allure of the artificial. His paintings mix references from art history with quotidian objects and then transform them into strangely synthetic surfaces and uncanny digital scenarios. These themes are amplified in the accompanying moving image work and audio installation produced in collaboration with musician and sound artist Alex Roberts.

Robin’s videos are produced to work alongside paintings; instead of contained narratives they are formed of looping, mutating vignettes with fragments of abstracted text. Following from the paintings the video makes obtuse reference to medieval artifacts, occult systems, cybernetics, bio-technology, data collection and science-fiction. The audio serves to heighten the sense of strangeness, mixing field recording and synthesis into feedback-loopsthat pulse between blissful, eerie and immersive

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