IF you saw a man rummaging through boxes in a Perth op shop, it might just have been Kevin Robertson, hunting for his next dusty muse.
The artist has an unusual technique of juxtaposing second-hand figurines and other curios with real-life people in his paintings.
In his latest exhibition Re-Pose, he toys with scale and perspective, so the figurine often dwarfs the human subject or looms over them in a menacing manner.
It’s a bit disorientating and spooky—what is it with dolls and figurines?—like David Lynch directed Alice in Wonderland.
• (above and below) Scene 4 and Scene 6 from Kevin Robertson’s Re-Pose exhibition at Art Collective WA in Perth.
“I wanted to engage with the vitality of these figurines in an imaginative way to create worlds in themselves,” Robertson says.
“I think I was looking at a doco on the making of the movie Metropolis and became interested in how Fritz Lang combined small-scale sets with living actors when the penny dropped for me.
“I thought how interesting it would be to have real people interact with the figurines.”
The process is painstaking as Robertson doesn’t work from photos.
“I set up dioramas to work from and there were long sessions of posing for the paintings from the model,” he says.
The Voice especially likes Scene 6, which could be a still from an arthouse horror movie.
Rendered in cool blues, a male 19th-century Spanish-looking figure with boots and a hat presides over a woman in a bathing suit and cap.
It’s a fantastic non sequitur and even though the two subjects are incongruous, there’s a weird symmetry to it all.
“I like Scene 6, because it is quite strange, but I am pleased with all the works in this series,” Robertson says. “The people in my paintings are either self-portraits or people close to me.”
Most of the oil paintings in Re-Pose are largish in scale and square, giving the exhibition a nice flow.
“I was very lucky to see Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel in Padua when I was younger and loved the way it created a narrative,” Robertson says.
“It was mind-blowing how Giotto had solved so many problems of depth, colour and representation by the beginning of the 14th century. I used Giotto’s squarish format (and a similar size by coincidence) to create my own ‘plotless play’.”
Born in Norseman in the Goldfields region of WA in 1964, Robertson studied painting at the Western Australian Institute of Technology (now Curtin University), graduating with a BA in 1984. His paintings are in many public and private collections including Artbank, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Wesfarmers, Bankwest and UWA.
Over his long career, the artist has painted everything from domestic interiors to the cosmos, exploring different colour palettes and styles, including abstraction.
“There are so many influences in these works as suggested by the title of Re-Pose, but some of the artists who influenced me in these paintings include the Italian metaphysical painter Giorgio Morandi, Australian artists such as Nerissa Lea and Susan Flavell, and the American Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein,” Robertson says.
“I love oil painting—it looks different from every angle which gives it a ‘living and breathing’ quality.”
Re-Pose is at Art Collective WA, 2/565 Hay Street, Perth, until November 28. For more details see artcollectivewa.com.au and kevinrobertson.org.
by STEPHEN POLLOCK