Sutton Gallery is pleased to present In Time, a solo exhibition by Rachael Robb.
Time and its many paradoxes are at the heart of Rachael Robb’s practice. Employing the meticulous oil painting techniques established during the Northern Renaissance period, Robb distils an ever-expanding archive of ephemera to articulate a non-linear understanding of time. Her works portray an overlapping sequence of instances and recognitions, each harboured through the inconspicuous granularity of the printed copy.
Robb speculates time’s embodiment rather than forensically indexing it. The artist’s own experiences and memories of particular artworks, photographs, and letters are the subject of her meticulous compositions. Negotiating the legibility and inherited symbolism of the original referent, a tension arises with the shuffling of memory and motif. The scrupulous nature of each depiction contrasts against the schematic arrangement of paper and card collated in the artist’s studio. For Robb, the validity of this encounter is important. She attends to the incongruous border of the printed image, the errant light reflecting in the photograph, and the sparse backdrop of the studio wall as intently as the depiction of a Baroque painting, a Pre-Raphaelite drawing, or a Symbolist etching.
Often sharing a signification of the spectral and the ephemeral, the artist develops a language of eternalism and continuity through constellations of skulls, ghosts, angels, visions, memorials and burial sites. While not irreverent to the original form and its many symbolic resonances, Robb is concerned with the unremittingly faithful depiction of the copy or the reproduced version, as it is within these acutely tactile objects that meaning and memory are carried.
Collectively her compositions usher a flexible temporality that averts life’s cyclical course of beginnings and ends. The buckling paper, the off-centre border, the errant staple holes, the dog-eared corners, the thumb print: quotidian marks and unconscious gestures convey the passing, or rather continuation, of time through images. For Robb, time is inherently expansive, thus her painting denotes the recurrent, persistent, and amorphous nature of this existence.
