Chad Robertson: Disparate Collectives: New Paintings
Following his previous Mash-Up works, the artist continues his interest in music and implied narratives. Closes October 8 at Western Project.
Looking to create a ‘visual piece of music’, Robertson uses imagery from his travels around the globe, a picture from the news that caught his attention, old photographs, etc. He writes: The images become the words of a lyric or the sentence. It sets the scenario for the viewer to put together a story, but it’s important that it is their story. Robertson holds up a ‘mirror’ of events and objects in the world around us; layering political events, natural disasters, intimate physicality and the minutia of life. He presents a cacophony of experience as a frozen moment, as to witness; capturing the notion of evolving histories, and the ever changing, growing and moving world around us. Influenced by De Kooning and Rauschenberg’s ideas of ‘all-overness’, and particularly Rauschenberg’s abandonment of pictorial hierarchy, Robertson treats his images equally, employing a similar layering and patterning to imply the interconnectedness of events occurring. It is a conceptual as well as philosophical view: no hierarchy equals all happening, all together.
"My experience going to Africa and my ongoing personal connections that I have there now really bring the continent into the first world in my mind. It shares a space in my conscious now, therefore sharing space in my paintings," states Robertson.
As our world is more technologically connected than any time in human history, his paintings imply the shift in awareness of possibilities, the multiple layers of consciousness existing, and the simultaneity of the internal and external worlds. As Rauschenberg’s later works developed analogies between visual arts and music, Robertson’s narratives are visual songs of contemporary life: operatic, reflective and universal.
Chad Robertson has exhibited previously in Munich, Stockholm, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, and at Sixspace in Los Angeles.
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