NYAB Event - Robert Buck “New Work”

Robert Buck “New Work”

CRG Gallery

This event has ended.

For my third show at CRG Gallery (as Robert Buck), I’m exhibiting eight paintings from three new bodies of work: “At the end of the day…”; The Letter! The Litter!; and Figure of Speech. Aware of obstacles, repetition and the drive, my aim was to seize what lies “beyond the pleasure principle”, via myself, as subject, and civilization, as it operates in hypermodernity.

“At the end of the day…” paintings rekindle a recent headline-news event, an inexplicable, yet no longer uncommon, random act of violence or maleficence. A single image of what happened, or its aftermath, salvaged from scores of images dumped on the inter-net, is cropped, flipped, inverted, multiplied, and printed on canvas. Disrupting the digitally generated mosaic is a silkscreened image of an organically occurring pattern in nature, one with a subliminal link to the event. At first glance the image-event lattice is likely to be apperceived as wallpaper, fabric, or décor. But look again, and the trellis of recurring images isn’t the trauma but a screen against it. Precipitated by the collusion of science and capitalism, the impasses of civilization have disordered nature, which consequently no longer abides by the same “laws” it once did. Against this stuttering backdrop, it’s not easy to know what is “unnatural” and what is not.

The Letter! The Litter! canvases are embellished transcriptions of some scrap of writing I find on the street, discarded or lost remainders of a correspondence, diary, or publication. I pair the littered words with the pattern or print of factory-made fabric, which is stretched as canvas. The printed pattern is re-worked with acrylic paint and dressmaking materials, such as safety pins or grommets, which I use to make the words or letters. In 2014, using garment fabric as canvas is an immediately identifiable “ready-to-wear” means to detain the eye and cipher the body. It’s also a nod to Duchamp having divined the readymade with the introduction of pre-mixed manufactured pigments in a tube – there is no “blank canvas”, the mark’s been made.

The diptych Figure of Speech (“Father Christmas”) is about the body itself as littered by language, in which the second canvas modifies associations sparked by the first one. The work was inspired by a homophonic word play of the expression “Father Christmas” that appeared in a dream. I use store bought fabrics, in this case intentionally clashing ones, as the ground and interrupt or “break” the pattern with multiple gestures. This is the most autobiographical work in the show; a direct attempt to make sense of the havoc caused by the death of my seven year-old brother when I was six.
Painting in the 21st Century begs an alternate timeframe, both for its making and reception, and incarnates an increasingly prevalent paradox: the body as obsolete, waste product, yet real, the necessary substance with which to fulfill the impossible injunction to “enjoy better”.
– Robert Buck, El Paso, TX, June 2, 2014