Seconds Away
Oct 2-12, 2002
Anne Robinson | painting | space 1,2 | supported by Peabody Trust

Anne Robinson's recent paintings continue a body of work engaged with the television moment — the freeze frame. The work focuses on images of wrestlers as well as continuing with hospital:medical dramas. In addition to dissecting the video image, and subjecting the fleeting television moment to intense scrutiny, there is a strand in this body of work which is directly about contemporary fulfilment of spiritual needs — reflections on the life or death moment.

The wrestling work moves away from fiction and yet is still dealing with the 'constructed' and not the 'real'. As Barthes has said: " …wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles…. a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve." In these new paintings, there is more dynamism and more of the TV screen effect of motion, and yet there is space within the work for reflection on the nature of violence.

Engaging with the moments in-between when they are extracted from the narrative, TV images taken from even superficially banal mid-evening entertainment become heightened, visceral and, at times, disturbing. Painting captures the dramatic moment, and yet does so quietly, with beautiful texture and light quality — nothing added and yet more than the mundane television experience. Gerhard Richter has suggested that "…painting offers something of a universal interest: a statement, a new quality, an advance.." Here, simulated violence becomes beautiful in the blue TV screen light — the surface of the oil paint ironically evocative of many ultra-modern imaging devices and screens.