Influenced by a myriad of disparate and iconic artists such as Brancusi, Bourgeois, Diebenkorn, and Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Kelly creates art that is intelligent, alert, harmonious, and yet paradoxical. Incorporating unexpected materials from his travels, Kelly layers for example printed antique papers, documents, signs, and vintage posters onto panels that are then built up and covered with saturated pigments. Remnants of their beauty and the history and language they impart are thus preserved in new modern ways. Paint is applied with puzzle-like precision in shapes that capture strong lines, forms, and color. These are sophisticated works that carefully meld the past with the modern and the new in an elegance that is just beautiful. Kelly is especially mindful of how the shapes in his work interact with each other.
"Much like a stonemason building a wall, my recent work seems to be anchored in a step-by-step process of composing formal puzzles. I have grown fond of the pared-down tools of line, form and color and the bountiful yield of their juxtapositions, without the need of references or symbolic otherness to give them meaning. The tension of exquisite junctions and disjunctions achieved by a process of patient build-up of papered and painted layers and edge-to-edge arrangements, makes for a fine focus of meditative work. Though the work has formal and austere footings the efforts of edit and re-edit seems to create sensual surfaces that expose a history of tactile decisions. My affection for the likes of Hans Arp, Myron Stout, Tony Smith, Brancusi, Calder and Ellsworth Kelly, plus the Bauhaus Gang, coupled with over 20 years of crafting the surfaces I paint on, gives me a small niche in this intimate investigation of form that I can call my own."
—Robert Kelly
Robert Kelly’s Thickets series stands out in a singular manner in his body of work. Much of his work has a solidity of form and shape. With the thickets the viewer is seduced by thin lines that have obviously been laid in assemblage on the panel, creating a pattern of what appears to be trees or branches. The connotation of a thicket is alluring but his compositions are well conceived, and the result is a minimalist play of patterning that is indelible.
It has been stated by Kelly that he with these works he likes to take the notion of a finished work and upend that by cutting it up and re-arranging it. He has also likened what he does in his work to mason building a wall and both the above explanations add visual and intellectual understand to his work.