Jesse Robinson

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA

Artist statement

My creative interests center on the relationship between objects and images. This is, in a way, an investigation into the relationship between “art” and “life.” In coming to painting by way of sculpture I’m sensitive to the physical nature of a painting as well as its unique ability to prompt close/deep looking. It’s precisely the interplay of these two divergent characteristics that animate my work. I begin each painting by building stretchers and attaching the canvas to the (usually hidden) supports in such a way as to create a small shallow indentation. Through this modification to the surface a new space is opened—one that straddles the “real world” and the “pictorial world.” Drawing from my collection of hundreds of readymade objects sourced both from my immediate environment and the far reaches of the internet I create pairings and configurations, looking to facilitate collaborations between objects and surfaces. The objects are held in place only by their gravity and the conventions of painting. They are simultaneously subject to the same gravity as you or me, while also existing in the compositional space of the painting. In a way, this is a reimagining of the classic figure/ground relationship not as a static relationship rendered in paint, but as a dynamic proposition existing in both time and space.

Artwork