ROBERT
PEPPER
Selected Works of An Englishman Abroad
March
11, 2000 - June 11, 2000
The
Anglo-American artist Robert Pepper, who
moved his studio from Manchester, U.K. to
Reading, Pennsylvania, fuses a rich European
avant garde painting tradition with a post-modern
American vision. Working in the United States
since 1983, Pepper is internationally acclaimed
for a flawless mastery of the technique
of oil painting combined with the passionate
creation of images wrapped in their own
enigmas. His unexpected juxtapositions of
color and form forge new connections between
memory and reality. The ravishing images
often seem odd or even bizarre, yet manage
to create phantom myths of fragile, razor-sharp
balance. A strong neo-romantic impulse pervades
his best work with spiritual roots immersed
in Cubism, Surrealism, and Expressionism.
His decidedly contemporary urban imagery
comes from magazines, films, television,
illustration, advertising, comic strips
and video. This media-driven content is
filtered through his personal experiences
in the gritty post-industrial cities of
Manchester and Reading at the end of the
twentieth century. All these elements are
absorbed into his own personal world of
vivid expression, giving the viewer multiple
levels of simultaneous reality and fantasy.
Throughout
his exile in America, Robert Pepper became
increasingly preoccupied with the vicissitudes
of the artist's existence. His work also
reflects the multitudinous changes in modern
life and epochal shifts in society, the
subliminal differences between old and new
world culture, the subtle blending of actuality
and artifice, and the ironic dichotomy between
lush visual idea and stark reality. His
understated critique of British post-imperialism
and American material overabundance is interposed
with an ongoing quest to distinguish perception
from actuality. The expansiveness of his
fugitive and fertile imagination has never
permitted the safe harbor of a consistent,
unitary style or a singular unalloyed technique.
His artistic approach, described by Pepper
himself as a "free arena of expression,"
has resulted in a dynamic and varied body
of work in which flat allusionistic canvases
alternate with three-dimensional sculpture
and multi-faceted bas-relief paintings.
The remarkable series of sumptuous and sculptural
paintings sometimes contain found objects,
but more often consist of elements conceived
and fabricated by the artist from a freewheeling
frame of reference.
The
paintings are the end result of arduous,
intensive preparatory work. Each painting
is elaborately planned, beginning with a
myriad of inchoate visual images which reverberate
in the artist's brain and are then transferred
by the hand and eye into a series of sketches.
His formative materials consist either of
brush and ink drawings or his own photographs.
The most ambitious and complex works are
often informed by a cut and paste technique
derived from Cubist collage of the first
decades of the twentieth century. Pepper
gives fresh, vigorous meaning to this time-tested
device by incorporating collage elements
directly onto the picture plane, often painting
over the attached relief images.
Pepper's
work in portraiture, which has been a constant
throughout his career, has consistently
demonstrated his uncompromising mastery
of transcribing human features into hauntingly
analytical two-dimensional representations.
The brilliantly penetrating introspective
portrait of the artist Jane Runyeon, one
of a series of large heads, is a product
of concentrated observation and meticulous
technique. It represents his continuation
of experimentation with deep blues and blacks;
an attempt to come to terms with the human
face through the adaptation of cinematic
extreme close-up.
The
key to understanding Pepper's expressive
visual style is his unique serendipity,
which accounts for the unexpected variety
of themes and techniques, often within a
single painting. The open-ended, polyphonic
work in which one image invariably suggests
another is propelled by a conjoining cinematic
aesthetic of poetically resonant montage.
In his most complex paintings, transparencies
of vibrant color meld into elegant masses,
evoking hallucinary discontinuity through
random fragmentation. This compositional
feat is accomplished through Pepper's perceptive
command of spacial intervals. His fine-tuned
use of "quick cuts," derived from
motion pictures, results in a phenomenal
arrangement of robust ambiguous images "collaged"
into the pictorial space.
Visions
of supreme elation are frequently counterpointed
by scenes of sparse desolation and despair
presented from extreme angles and distorted
perspectives. The complex, appropriated
imagery compels the viewer down an enigmatic
pathway through free-associated layers of
meaning and elliptical narrative structures.
His lavish, fantastic concoctions that define
specific social textures of the human condition
are remarkable for their emotional and visual
flourishes. Pepper's incredible visionary
blending of expressionistic sensuality,
romantic lyricism, rapturous transformations,
grotesque wit, dreamy eroticism, psychological
nuance, broodingly intense moods, invite
the viewer on a voyage of enthralling discovery.
Jane Runyeon
Co-curator
Robert Metzger, Ph.D
Director, CEO, Chief Curator Reading
Public Museum
Reading Public Museum
500 Museum Road, Reading, PA 19611
Telephone: 610.371.5850
Planetarium Telephone: 610.371-5850 ext.244
Copyright © 2002 Reading
Public Museum.
All rights reserved.
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