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Green Pebble Magazine
Articles> Robert Priseman
Robert
Priseman: Head Space
Green Pebble June 2009 issue
Image published
with permission of The Goldmark Gallery
Enter
a room, any room, and what does a person know about its history? Do they
sense the drama that has unfolded there in the past or is the room neutral,
reflecting only what we choose to project onto it? What if someone has died
there, committed suicide, or been executed? Is there a way of judging the
event just from observing the space?
For Robert Priseman, these are some of the questions he seeks to address
with his large, eerily still oil paintings of ‘spaces’. Whether
the subject matter is a hospital surgery, a hallway or an execution chamber,
his paintings and etchings invite the viewer to step onto an abandoned stage
after the drama has passed, and to reflect on the life-changing, often ugly,
events that have been played out there.
‘Don’t get me wrong, I like things that are really beautiful,’
Robert says over lunch at his home and studio in Wivenhoe, Essex. ‘But
I want to draw people in, in order to show them something that isn’t
so beautiful.’
The dichotomy he creates has a ‘push-me-pull-you’ effect which
he achieves by removing all figures from the composition and then stripping
down colour, perspective and subject matter to the point where the viewer
becomes the figure in the painting.
‘You’re engaged before you realize what it is you’re looking
at,’ he explains. ‘The idea is to create an environment which
has the initial appearance of being quite soothing. I like the idea of someone
coming across one of my paintings and thinking, Oh, that’s interesting
and then realizing what they’re looking at and going, Ugh! To me,
that creates a fuller sense of engagement; it becomes intellectually interesting.’
His subject matters are unnerving: hospitals; subterranean spaces; the life
of artist Francis Bacon; international methods of execution; and most recently,
the history of gas chambers. At first glance it is possible to assume Robert’s
fascination with the macabre is an attention-grabbing ploy: even with an
Arts Council grant in his pocket, for instance, he was unable to arrange
a viewing of an execution chamber because the prison services felt he was
trying to profit from other people’s misery.
But speak to him, and view his art, and an entirely different ethos emerges.
Nothing about 43-year-old Robert Priseman suggests he is interested in reveling
in the ghoulish. Quite the opposite: ‘I want to hold up a mirror.
I’m not looking to make a moral judgment, I’m looking to allow
others to explore the morality of what they’re engaged in.’
And he does this by creating large life-size works that are subdued, soft,
carefully executed, and extremely unsettling...
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