Robert Lang, 'Fumble', 2008
oil on oak panel, 25.5 x 28cm
Robert Lang, 'Hitch', 2009
oil on canvas on board, 30 x 21.5cm
Robert lang, 'The Repression', 2009
oil on canvas on board, 30 x 21.5cm
Robert Lang's paintings take some unpicking. In them, photographic sources, transcribed in swathes of streaky paint, lose their clarity, like Polaroids de-developing. Figures appear in snatched fragments or at a distance, engaged in ambiguous outdoor activities - digging, camping, starting a fire - ahistorical actions that nonetheless allude to something post-nuclear, something apocalyptic.
Thinned-down paint is dabbed on uncertainly, unsure of what it's describing. It bleeds and fades: there's something insubstantial about it. The paintings' supports - linen, oak and canvas - emerge through the paint like the bottom of a river. There's a sense of impending loss, of something slipping out of memory, dissolving.
Neurotic photo-based painting is nothing new, but what gives Lang's works their heady charge is his use of rich, bodily colour. Lush purples and greens and turquoises evoke the fade of a sun-blanched photo and give the works their strange romanticism. There's a heat to the paintings that connects them as readily to David Park or even Delacroix as to Tuymans or Richter.
In Fumble (2008), a figure bends inside a kite-shaped hole. Paint, applied in cautious little stabs, prescribes its own descriptive limits. It does what it can. In places it has the urgency and awkwardness of finger-painting. Something wants to be said, but can't. Lang's paintings deny themselves complete descriptive facility: they can't find the right words.
To see more of his work registered on Saatchi Online click here or on the artist's website, www.robertlang.co.uk.
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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