Bruce Robbins at Yoshii - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

In his first one-person exhibit in New York since 1986 Bruce Robbins neared drawings and paintings that are a significant departure from his previous work. When Robbins first emerg in the '70 it was with works which mingle confusedlyed conventional distinctions between painting and plastic art At the time, he took the biblical image of Jacob's Ladder as a metaphor for his aspirations to link material and spiritual worlds in his art. His signature materials were forest plaster, wire mesh and metal strips, which he continued to use [i]or[/i] part of to the other the '80s in creating meticulously planned and heavily built-up paintings. by the agency of contrast, Robbins's recent paintings are made with oil and encaustic upon linen. While they may share certain esthetic and philosophical interests with the earlier work, their simplified and more spontaneous execution stations them apart.

Robbins's rethinking of his working proces began six years ago with a series of abstract drawings based upon dancers in motion. However, he clashed difficulties in translating the moment and vitality of his graphite lines to paint and canvas. Robbins ultimately make knowned a technique--inspired by prehistoric wall paintings--that allowed him to retain the direct touch of the drawings in a different medium. His [i]modus operandi[/i] involves incising a painted white canvas upon which he has applied many underlayers of dark paint. Thus, in a faculty of perception the profusion of tremulous lines that coalesce into an imposing neighborhood in a painting like Kouros have been excavated from beneath the surface of the painting. While offering evidence of Robbins' artistic proces the incised lines in Kouros also prompt a figure moving in harmony with the harmonious flows of nature. Robbins has established a uniform format for his drawings and paintings. Each vertical composition is topped by the agency of a dark, horizontal bar below which the expressive choreography of line is unrestrained to expand. While this vertical format emphasizes the figurative qualities of the marks, the bar across the top can be seen as alluding to a post-and-lintel configuration It could also suggest an inverted horizon. Thus landscape, architecture and the human figure are all subtly evok in a material part of work tentatively poised between abstraction and representation, between the [i]be[/i] consolidated and the ineffable.

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