Sorcha Dallas

Jimmy Robert’s artworks are liable to attract a whole range of catchall terms for contemporary art: They are performative, yet object-based; cinematic, yet haptic. In this exhibition, ink-jet prints, film and video, MDF boards, and A4-size sheets of white paper manage to make all these descriptors strangely happy consorts. Boards and blank sheets divide and chart the space, functioning not only as makeshift walls and supports but also as compositional elements in their own right. But rather than obscure or modify the standardized format of these elements, Robert embraces their standardization in all its banal glory. In one work, an ink-jet print of a forlorn bedside table is thumbtacked to the wall, partially obscured by a quintet of blank A4s. Other sheets slump together at the floorboard, one printed with a waggish narrative fragment that, as if in the windfall of all this paper, has lost the rest of its take. By creasing and furling these sheets and distributing their silhouettes throughout the show, Robert uses the blank page, and the ink-jet technology associated with it, to both exploit subtle textures and thwart narrative completion.

Such gestures of concealment are like an elegant striptease: in collages tucked behind MDF panels, in a photo portrait partly covered with a twisted page that references the chiffon bodice of Sargent’s Lady Agnew of Lochnaw ( a postcard of the nineteenth-century painting rests beside it), or in an undulating torso viewed through a doorway in the film Saynètes, 2004. But in his most stirring works, elusion can also occur in the illusion of full disclosure. Robert’s collages, scanned and reproduced on large posters, seem to crackle with graphic precision, every arabesque of tape precisely affixed behind the inviolable surface of digital technology – masquerading, almost successfully, as textured surfaces. Bu this nearly pornographic precision is less the byproduct of any technological fixation than an effort to eke delicacy out of standardized, indelicate modes of reproduction. Tacked up with an entomologist’s self-conscious care, these reproductions put forth rare pleasures.