Robert Flynn, 'The Great Lawn', 2005
graphite and charcoal
dimensions variable
Robert Flynn, 'The Great Lawn' (detail), 2005
graphite and charcoal
dimensions variable
Robert Flynn, 'Bad Neighbours (Dollarweed 1)', 2006
graphite & charcoal on paper
203cm x 203cm
Robert Flynn's pitch-black graphite-and-charcoal drawings of plants and seedlings fade into shadow at the edges of the paper as though photographed in a nineteenth-century studio. Their backgrounds, too, have the colourless blankness of a drop cloth, casually bringing to mind family portraiture, a passport photograph, a head-shot. And yet their subjects - so darkened that their identification as plants, let alone differentiation into species, is made difficult - elude the associations of personal distinction their setting and precision suggest. In 'The Great Lawn', Flynn arranges a number of superficially similar drawings, of varying sizes, in a wonky grid, in a nod to Allan McCollum's arcane taxonomies of amphorae. Each plant has had its coloration, texture and structure - those identification marks that allow it to slide into an established ecological pecking order - blotted out, censored, Malevich-ified. The plant's absence - or rather, its presence as elusive silhouette - engenders a kind of Triffidian panic, nature slipping away from the categorisation that nullifies its weird power. 'St Augustine', a slab of mossy sod, crawls across the picture like a bad slug. It might eat you.
Flynn's fascination with the micro-surrealism of the back garden has its comic dimension, too. 'Bad Neighbours (Dollarweed 1)' sets a field of entangled weeds on the sharply inclined floor, a backyard Pollock. Each blacked-out leaf has the pulsing threat of a cartoon bomb; the intertwining stems coil about wickedly like barbed wire. The photo-studio feel lends the weed a vastness it doesn't actually have, in a sleight-of-hand made possible by Flynn's finessed rendering of sepal and stem. Even when colour arrives - as in the sarcastically celebratory 'Garland' - it sits on the surface, refusing to join in, dribbling and glooping like gobs of blood.
To see more of his work registered on Saatchi Online click here or on the artist website, www.robert-flynn.com.
Ben Street
Ben Street is a teacher of Art History living in London, and every so often he writes on new and old art for Artnet, Triple Canopy, Art21 and Art Review. He is also a lecturer and storyteller for children aged between 3 and 19 at London's National Gallery, and spends his summers lecturing around Italy for Art History Abroad. Ben is a former educator at the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and started his career packing ice-cream at an ice-cream factory in East Anglia. To read more of Ben's stuff, go to thebenstreet.blogspot.com.
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