© Robin Curtil
Painting as a sensitive language is my interest. The canvas
is my space for experimentation and reflection. It’s through the painting
activity itself that I strive to grasp my artwork. Each new canvas is the
continuation of a patient and formal research based on all the preceding
paintings. I proceed by layering, repeating, and erasing. The properties of oil
paint give me the opportunity to play with impasto, transparency, overlay, and
the representation of volume or surface inducing perspective and figuration.
Part of my research focuses on an in-between : the
interactions of a painting, which would call for a figuration, where the
brushstroke fades in favor of what it represents, and an abstract painting,
where the brushstroke sometimes tends to become its own reason for being. It is
on this edge, between a painting that only refers to its own surface and a
painting that represents, that my work takes place.
When I work in the studio, I seek to provoke this moment of
astonishment that I didn't expected but which transpires. I do not construct a
painting beforehand, I search for it, I explore it and it is between the loss
of control and its recovery that it comes to me progressively. This process requires
time and patience: it is a wild, unpredictable animal that must be tamed. The
visible result of this research is staged in fragments and the production of
paintings appears as much as affirmations then proposals in the form of open
questions. In constant metamorphosis and elusively, the oil
disguises itself and takes on multiple appearances.
© Robin Curtil
Robin Curtil’s abstract paintings first seem to be remarkably
efficient, in a nearly purely graphic register of efficacy, with stark
contrasts between bright colors and white backgrounds. But things become
markedly more complex if you take a second look.
Gestural shapes and drawn with meticulousness, what seemed to be a tow-dimensional plane reveals unexpected depths, juxtapositions sometimes appear as strata, and in some other instances, as planes. Stains, strokes, colors partly wiped out, graffiti : those paintings run the whole gamut of the different types of traces. But a trace, as is commonly known, evokes a specific memory. It preserves parts of the presence of a thing but is distinct from the quotations used by previous generations of artists, which referred to a specific point of origin. The visual immediacy of these paintings is thus paradoxically combined with a sense of duration, of the slow passing of time, also hinted at by the superimposed layers through which shapes start to emerge. This sense of a memory inherent to the patting is also echoed by the more or less explicit presence of a painting within the painting.The diversity of the motives and the heterogeneity of elements seem to spring forth from these different strata. The painting thus offers a punctual snapshot of a transitory state where shapes, between appearance and disappearance, coexist without ever freezing up, caught in a persisting ambiguity.
Unlike historic abstraction, but also significantly diverging from its later quotational deconstruction, Robin Curtil’s paintings derives from an impulse toward survival, caught in a state of uncertainty, but also corresponding to true, exhilarating freedom.
Romain Mathieu, 2020
©robin curtil, 2023 © adagp, 2023