Jimmy Robert

Born: 1975, Guadeloupe, France

Based: Brussels

Represented by: Galerie Diana Stigter, Amsterdam

Robert addresses the fragility of representation through photography, performance, and film. The artist often inserts his own presence into installations of found imagery which he has transformed and restaged, generating an intriguing dialectic of alienation and belonging, of “physical” and “political” action. His films, prints, happenings and publications focus around the point at which the transient characteristics of time-based-acts become institutionally solidified as writing, photography and public media. The image-object relation is crucial to Robert in this respect. Even his collage works transcend their image-status and reach out towards three-dimensionality, only to be collapsed back into their pictorial limits. Cut and folded into three-dimensional shapes, they are bandaged with masking tape, before often being scanned and reprinted as flat wall-mounted pictures. Adhesive tape also featured as a cruel component of a recent performance during his show ‘Figure de Style’, at London’s Cubitt gallery in 2008. Actualising the taboo ‘politics of touching and being touched’, the performance took as its starting point Yoko Ono’s seminal Cut Piece (1964). But instead of the sharp tailor’s scissors offered Ono’s participants, Robert’s spectators were invited to rip-off pieces of tape which fabricated a make-shift carapace around his otherwise naked torso. The audience’s vulture-like actions were meanwhile reflected back at them via press reviews of the original performance, which Robert read aloud as he underwent his self-reflexive promethean ordeal. For the critic Sarah Lowndes, Robert’s re-enactment “could be seen both as highlighting the multivalent properties of Ono’s performance… and as providing an example of the unpredictable possibilities generated by the live situation”.

Laurence Figgis