Kevin Kavanagh is pleased to present Afterimages, an exhibition of new paintings by Robert Armstrong.
Robert Armstrong has of late embarked on a number of paintings that pay attention to apparently inconsequential aspects of images seized from an assortment of historical and contemporary sources. Often the focus is on fragments cropped out of historically significant, richly detailed and symbolically loaded scenes – we are variously granted glimpses of Dürer, Bocklin, Holbein, Poussin and more.
But just as we might begin to play the connoisseur with these paintings, attempting to identify the provenance of each subject we are likely to be thrown off balance. Randomly, we encounter other images that, while carrying strong hints of mythological or symbolic associations or evoking artistic explorations of sublime experience in nature, in fact have their origins in more notionally mundane representational traditions: in illustration, magazine photography or the daily news. So though we see in the series a ghostly image of a remote island that is undoubtedly based on Arnold Bocklin’s ‘Island of the Dead’, we also come across other islands that are not without resemblance to this haunted symbolist icon, but that have unexpected pictorial sources – such the glossy
pages of National Geographic. Recognition, then, can be accompanied by disorientation, as the fragments from the art canon are accompanied by mass-media ephemera. Repeatedly, these returns, these diverse ‘afterimages’, prompt fraught questions about how we read surfaces – how we assess their textural conditions and see beyond their masking effects.
Armstrong’s paintings in these ways re-order the fragments of a disorientating image culture. They attempt to penetrate through multiple layers of appearance, offering an incidental practice of looking in which, as T.J. Clark proposes in relation to Poussin, the image “breaks up, recrystallizes, fragments again, persists like an afterimage.”
