Emil Robinson - Familiars

About

In these works, Robinson continues to find inspiration in his immediate environment. He combines highly detailed still lives with the abstraction of colour field painting, resulting in puzzles of semiotics and formalism.

Robinson is attracted to unassuming subjects, such as a dustpan or bulletin board. While the items he chooses to depict are literal, the actual focus is on an elusive essence that holds no physical shape. The artist seeks to uncover a nobility in these objects and a spiritual intensity using light, colour, and form. He assembles iconic imagery capable of conjuring new, mysterious and associative narratives. By trusting his instincts and taking time to contemplate, these works become a shared moment rather than a painting of the object specifically.

The compositions present light as an embedded quality that dissolves the boundaries between object, body, and space. Colour fields allow the artist to respond to the abstract interaction between feelings and environment. The gap between various formal elements in the paintings – from full-bodied realism to abstraction – mirrors the gap between the objective physical world and the subjective interior world full of conflicting ideas that must be resolved or ignored.

Robinson invites these entities to embody his intangible experience, allowing the painting to bridge between the artist's consciousness and the external world of objects.