黑料不打烊

Gideon Rubin鈥檚 third solo exhibition at ROKEBY includes a series of some of the artists largest scale paintings to date.

The source of the new paintings are old yearbooks; commemorative annuals that have been abandoned by their owners and collected and amassed by the artist. Black and white images of strangers from the mid-Twentieth Century are translated onto canvases and embedded within the materiality of paint. Within the new paintings Rubin鈥檚 now recognizably refined palette of subdued ochre鈥檚, greys and blues offer the figures a sense of shared cadence and time. Placed within increasingly abstracted, empty and ambiguous landscapes, and painted with apparently effortless and unhesitatingly bold brushstrokes, each character draws the attention of the viewers eye as much as their imagination.

Removed from their original context and lifted into another, the full-length figures are transplanted into understated, empty and seemingly continuous space. Time and space conflate in paintings that give equal importance to the brushwork as to the content. What Rubin achieves through unlabored brushstrokes is what he imagines of each figure he carefully selects to observe. The slump of a shoulder, turn of a head or a slight hand gesture communicate a great deal more than the minimal execution should grant.   The paintings scale means they coexist and maintain a direct physical relationship to the viewer, however more often than not the characters turn away from the audience denying us certain information. Painting becomes the subject of these works; the shortcomings of representation, the material restraints as well as the possibilities of the medium.