CLERESTORY
EMIL ROBINSON
3/14/25-4/26/25
Emil Robinson - Plant in Winter, Oil on Panel, 12" x 9"
The Weather Station is pleased to present Clerestory, an exhibition of oil paintings by Emil Robinson. Clerestory brings together a body of recent work from this Cincinnati-based artist, whose observational technique and careful synthesis of form, light, and material invest his humble subjects with the austerity of a monument, or the gravitas of the spiritual.
"When I was a younger art student" Emil says, "around 20 years old, I first saw Edward Hopper's paintings. I liked them immediately, but as I got older found myself less and less interested in them. Recently, I saw one again, and it occurred to me just what the light in them does, is doing. Hopper uses light as a means of showing the smallness of being alive. The light in those paintings is a giant thing. There's a literal effect of the light, but also a psychological one: it's something that degrades, destabilizes, and overwhelms. The fact that Hopper organizes it so carefully, only sharpens the effect."
Insights like the above are typical of conversations with Robinson, an artist whose investment in painting's history and its ongoing possibilities are central to his own project. When speaking with him, it quickly becomes clear that he has a deep capacity for "unmixed attention," a faculty he channels into his own painting to great effect. There is a quiet intensity radiating from each of Robinson's pieces, one that suggests their various subjects - a cluster of peaches, sunlight on a wall - carry hidden weight for the artist, and for his audience.
Emil Robinson - Arts and Sciences, Oil on Panel, 36" x 50"
"When I have a subject," the artist says, "I feel like it can be everything. It can be a kind of cipher for my life experience." A bulletin board backed with dark fabric, dotted with clear plastic push pins and a bent coat hanger comprises the entirety of Arts and Sciences, the largest painting in this exhibition. Robinson's re-framing this field of black recasts his subject as a night sky, or a constellation - a velvet pictorial space whose openness suggests potential rather than emptiness. At the same time, the painting is a rigorous study of a distinctly un-monumental object, presented in deadpan and entirely without artifice. In each of the artist's paintings there are layers at play - of association, of metaphor, of symbolism or semiotics - but for Robinson, all of these come after the fact. First and foremost, the artist allows his subjects to announce themselves to him from the scrum of the daily, and to ring some kind of interior bell. Although the personal connection he initially feels with each of his painting's subjects may not ultimately be available to a viewer, Robinson trusts that "there is something there, something present... and if I can uncover it, then I've made a painting, I've made something that's interesting."
Emil Robinson - Melted Candles, Oil on Panel, 9" x 13"
Melted Candles groups its titular subjects towards the center of the composition, rendering them in a narrow range of greys. In the absence of color, the nimble, dancing hand of the artist's brush becomes especially visible - almost more so than the candles themselves. Despite the nihilistic associations with these sorts of colors, Robinson's greys carry a kind of tenderness. The weather in these paintings is one of warmth. While each piece in Clerestory is painted from direct observation, for Robinson the act of making them causes "the crystalline clarity and total certainty of a subject to dissolve, and disseminate." Melted Candles makes this dissolving particularly visible, but Four Peaches somehow accomplishes the opposite: in this piece, the four fruits - once again grouped at the composition's center - seem to gather additional gravity under the artist's focused hand and gaze. These nuances from one painting to the next - of framing, of handling, of attention and light - compose the language of the paintings, and speak to the artist's larger ambitions.
Emil Robinson - Open Hearts, Oil on Panel, 11" x 9"
Emil Robinson - Interior, 31" x 23", 2024
Emil Robinson is an artist and tenured Associate Professor at the University of Cincinnati. Presentations include a prize-winning painting in the Smithsonian and recent solo exhibitions with Taymour Grahne and Abattoir Gallery. Robinson has received grants or awards from Manifest gallery, the Ohio Arts Council, Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, and The Smithsonian. His work can be found in public and private collections including the Beth Rudin Dewoody collection in Miami, The Robert Buford collection Chicago, and the Robin Katz collection in London. Currently Robinson is working towards a solo exhibition in London for fall of 2025.