NATHANIEL ROBINSON | 2020 TO 2021 | August 28 – October 16, 2021

I had been taking photographs from the train for a few years before I thought to use them as the basis for paintings. The photographs themselves were mostly chaotic, awkward, and confusing. I would try to aim at something passing by, and by the time I pressed the shutter, an intractable tangle of branches or a weird fence with a tarp draped over it would have leapt into the middle of the frame. These ended up being the most interesting images to me. — Nathaniel Robinson

One thing to say about the still-life paintings is that like the landscapes they draw on what I see around me, things I don’t have to go out of my way to discover and that many people would consider ordinary sights. Of course, “ordinary” is a matter of perspective. I look at a mango, for example, and I’m first interested in its shape and the way its shadow flattens, etc., and then I think about the scars and bruises on it and the journey it took, and the systems involved, and there’s a vertigo to that, the object becomes like a tiny toehold on a giant invisible cliff.
— Nathaniel Robinson

I think many of the paintings involve a sense of glimpses caught in passing, and the puzzle I try to solve is how to preserve this quality—a certain informality and precipitousness—while also crystallizing a particular overall structure.
— Nathaniel Robinson