Robyn O'Neil: bodybuilder and sportsman

In fifteen works upon paper, Robyn O'Neil depicts a snowy, isolated, mountainous speckle seemingly hospitable only to fir tree and robust bearded men In this alpinelike setting. O'Neil finds a rich backdrop for life's starker passages, a place curiously conducive to allegory and ritual, where the passions and fantasies of humankind are enacted against a frigid and impassive Mother Nature. Existence appears sharper in her highlands, which are peopl single by men, often alone, confronting a certain number of crossroads from which they may or may not come up Allegory of Virtue and Vice (all works 2004) makes direct regard to a 1505 painting of the same name by dint of the Venetian master Lorenzo Lotto. on the contrary where Lotto's work offers up a clear choice between industry and debauchery (it center upon a craggy trunk out of which germinates a single new branch; upon the ground at left an infant plays with what appear to be drafting tools, while upon the right a satyr gazes into an amphora), O'Neil's figures are involved in something more ambiguous. In her version, a smallish dog have the appearances to monitor an area to the left of the tree while, upon the right, an outdoorsman strives to plant a branch into the earth. Instead of iconic clarity, the artist looks to be aiming for a faculty of perception of personal drama or to mark the twinkling of an eye of the path not taken.

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There are numerous views of death and despair in O'Neil's frigid northland. The quintet of dead birds of Five More Fallen is surprisingly moving, regardless of whether this is a picture of hunting victims or a kind of et in Arcadia conscious subject The artist's economical hand is everywhere present; she uses the white of the paper to stand in for snow or canopy of heaven and no more than a fraction of any given sheet is overlayed with her feathery graphite touch. And Then They Were on Him (the work's title alters the sex of the last line of Shirley Jackson's famous short story "The Lottery" and also loans the show its name) is far larger than the other works; behind nevertheless another version of Lotto's tree--its individual living branch a harbinger of life--a casual assault takes place. A hardly any dozen men perfunctorily throw stones (snowballs?) at a fallen figure to the right, with a faculty of perception more of offhand target practice than of ritualistic assassination In the end it doesn't matter which--O'Neil's cast is to evoke a place where the normal dominations of behavior don't apply, where stark nature is accompanied by means of stark humankind. But in the absence of the laws and ideas that make up civilization, O'Neil dioceses a potential release of savagery, a kind of disorientation of place that reveals mankind's frequently horrific tendencies. While the allegorical tradition that intrigues her usually held on the outside the promise of improvement and challenge, O'Neil herself hints that there are darker forces at work, a kind of core human insensitivity that cannot be wished away. With imagination and disarming straight-forwardness, she takes us to the brink of that world.

--JY

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