Sorcha Dallas

In 2005, at Galerie Diana Stigter I Amsterdam, Jimmy Robert debuted the five-minute dance and text piece Encore une journeé divine (Another Heavenly Day). The gallery had been painted gray, with a small gray carpet placed on the gray-painted floor. The artist, clothed in gray right down to his socks, enacted delicate and angular movements within the rug’s confines. Taped to the walls were sheets of paper that bore text corresponding to the artist’s physical gestures. “There is a movement for each of the 27 lines of text,” he says of the piece. “The movements are not illustrations of the text but a form of dialogue. The body is folded in the same way paper is folded. It becomes the material, each movement drawing different patterns on the carpet.”

The poetic, cerebral work of Robert may be danced; it may also be crumpled and hung on (or off) the wall, or may crackle in Super 8. His photo- and drawing-based works, performances, and films emphasize movement and its aftereffects. In his works on paper, the photographic image is beset by the forces to which the artist subjects it, in an effort to underscore – effect – its materiality: the paper the image is printed on may be folded and creased, or pieces of tape may be wadded up like chewing gum and stuck to its surface. Thus the images the artist chooses, often portraits, are divested of their narrative pull by his insistent investigation into their formal possibilities – just as the minimal, exacting choreography in performances like Encore une journeé divine discard the narrative and theatrical elements of contemporary dance. Robert’s work recalls that of Robert Morris and other post-Minimalists: at the same time, it bears relation to the current crop of young neoformalists. Robert’s abstraction is not strictly “cool”: his treatment of both the image and the body as material points toward a loss of content or, in the performative work, the self.

The deliberately disordered hangings of Robert’s works on paper give off a palpable tension. The images are often somewhat melancholic, with brown, white, or grayish tints, and the groupings mix the personal with the public. “They are either my own photos or found ones, from flea markets or newspaper,” the artist says, “I like to put them all on the same level, placing one of my relatives next to a bourgeois lady from the 19th century alongside some politician who made the front page.” If the strategy of juxtaposition to create new meaning is the classic one of collage, and all too familiar, Robert’s use of it is distinguished by the fact that his work touches only lightly on the images themselves. He takes them up with a certain hesitation and an attraction to their nonnarrative potential; he’s more interested in making one aware of the image’s surface and its limits, its actual physicality. The artist expands two-dimensional images into three, exuding something dynamic, even explosive, while undermining their often romantic visual content.

For example, in Untitled (2006), a photograph of a shirtless young man posed in a cloakroom, fists clenched like a boxer’s is scanned and printed onto a large sheet of paper. Although the image displays the outmoded hues of old family portraits, Robert resists the tug of nostalgia. The paper is creased toward the center, so that instead of staying put, it twists, bucks, puffs up: the paper is turning on (or indeed, against) the pattern with which it is printed. In Untitled (2005), a blossoming shrub is printed on a long swath of white paper taped low on a wall so that it falls and stretches out along the ground; on the floor, two blocks of wood lie underneath it, making a wave of the paper. Flecked with fuchsia paint and carefully places pieces of masking tape, the glossy floral image undulates across the floor. An elegant and delicate composition, yes – but one that’s unstable and collapsing. The image’s decorative content ends up being diminished by the sculptural force of the object it has become.

Stretching, traction, contortion: the artist’s works on paper assert the gestures that shaped them. “I would like to manifest the intrinsic performativity of objects,” Robert says. “The body is always present, and the delicate paper is subjected to its force and somehow acts as a direct representation of that force.” If the image in Robert’s work, like the flowering shrub, asserts itself in a meticulous composition, it also obeys the impeding force, like that of the wood blocks, that has exceeded it; its content has become relegated to the background. When Robert situates his body at the center of his practice, regardless of medium, it is always with a slant towards abstraction. “I am never happy with representation,” he explains. “I want to mirror it to infinity. That is why I use film and do performances – to try and articulate the same thing with a deferral of the object.”

I first discovered Robert earlier this year in a group show at art:concept gallery in Paris. Although the artist grew up there, he was born in 1975 in the French archipelago of Guadeloupe. (Robert recently moved to Brussels, a city he describes nicely as “anarchical, paradoxical, and sensual.”) In the mid-‘90s he studied visual art and critical theory at Goldsmiths in London, observing the YBA explosion with skepticism: “Most of its actors were actually studying at some point at Goldsmiths, which meant that the work I made at the time, which was engaged with formal experimentation, was very much a reaction against that movement, if one can call it that.” It was during this time, wile the artist worked at LUX, the independent cinema collective, that he made his first films. Semiexperimental, semiscripted, and with a dreamy, flaneur atmosphere, the Super-8 efforts feature the artist’s friends and associates and tell stories through allusive touches and an atmosphere of languid confusion. French Film (2000) is a dérive through Marguerite Duras’s writing and the idea of desire that pervades it. The short black-and-white movie, narrated by Robert, visits the late author’s haunts and places that appeared in her writing, juxtaposing images of her old residences with shots of passersby on the street, on buses, in museums. More recently, Robert rendered homage to Bas Jan Ader in a video titled L’Éducation sentimentale (2005-2006), after Flaubert’s novel. “I like works in which the poetic, the political, and the personal are difficult to separate,” Robert says. “The work of people like David Hammons, Robert Filliou, Duras, John Stezaker, and Yvonne Rainer are significant to me.” It’s an eclectic top five, nearly all of whom leap naturally among dance, performance, writing, photography, and cinema: an eclecticism that suits Robert and his wide-ranging work very well.

Robert’s choreography, at once rigorous and graceful, evoked both the theater of the absurd and Samuel Beckett. In fact, Robert performed an excerpt of Beckett’s play Happy Days in 2004 with Ian White at Tate Britain for the Art Now project “6 things we couldn’t do, but can do now.” That show incorporated other performance works as well, including Trio A, a 1966 masterpiece by Rainer that’s emblematic of Robert’s interest in ridding dance of overly melodramatic motions and marked narrations. In retrospect, the artist says that learning this piece made me feel for a moment like I could come up with my own movements within the parameters of my studio, a bit like Bruce Nauman line dances in his studio [in Dance of Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square (Square Dance) (1967-68)] but with a different set of connotations: becoming more an object than a subject.” Just as in the works on paper, in which Robert’s formal and physical investigations manipulate the photographic image to sap its narrative content, the artist’s performances abandon ideas of closure – they’re less concerned with the why and more with the how. Nevertheless, Robert maintains an adroit tension and ambiguity at the core of his oeuvre. The recurrent gestures of folding and rustling, whether inflicted on a human body or a sheet of paper, are simply ways, Robert says, to “conceal what is ultimately a very emotional response to the porosity of materials.”