AGAINST THE TIDE

James Robinson is an expressionist, but not in the original figurative sense. Nor is he an abstract expressionist. There is far too much abstraction in his work for the former and too many personal, figurative and text elements for the latter. We are presented instead with combined gestural records and mind diaries. His art breaks all the rules. It may be torn, burned, ruptured, stitched up, or accreted with paint, gunk, nails and debris. It may be dark and threatening or pastel pink and quite pretty. His art flows on like a tide, picking up debris, expunging old marks, meandering, retreating, advancing again. Like the tide, Robinson is a force of nature and, like nature, his art is capable of sublimity and terror, of tranquillity and turbulence. Just as the retreating tide arranges jetsam on the sand at random, but with a sense of the absent power that placed it there, so Robinson’s art confronts us with a record of swirling activity. Warwick Brown