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
One of the most wonderful of the Mimesis Rouge series we have handled, this is an intriguing addition to this iconic series. Working in Red and either white or yellowish white, Kelly’s Mimesis series played greatly off edited and cropped circular and square and geometric forms.
Here there are two ways to visually approach the piece. The most obvious is its almost star like shape and to view this as having an “opening”. The second is the understanding that he has divided the space into 4 quadrants and that in three of the quadrants we are seeing an equally spaced, cropped circle and in the 4th a fully filled in square. Even though these are the primary forms composing the work it is the void that we focus on. There is an elegance and refinement in this Mimesis in the sharp and finely honed points. There is also a distant nod to surrealist shapes in this piece, perhaps accidentally.
As with all Kelly’s, upon close inspection we see the ever so slight drawing and subtle shading of the paper that has been adhered and buffed, to the board behind it which is the basis of all his works.
Visually simple and as we like to explain, arrived at with no level of ease or off-handedness. This series is great to live with and often does well pair with others from the series. The artist worked on this series over the course of quite a long span of time, this being a 2018 piece.