Charlie Roberts: Alien Visions

It is a strange feeling sensing the beautiful transcending into the weary—that thin veil slithering around and over the initial observation and luring the thoughts into another space. Not conscious nor with consent, the uncomfortable enters upon its own premise.

Charlie Roberts’ paintings are figurative renderings of scenes from the familiar. People, animals, and objects are placed in different environments of both interior and exterior landscapes. Riddled with pop-cultural, traditional, and historical imagery, he explores multiple fractions of social mechanisms while directing our attention with a sense of humor. Working freely with other works of art as reference points, moving from Otto Dix and El Greco to Jim Dine and Casper David Friedrich, his colors, movement, and rhythms are soft, dipping in and out of a logic of their own.

For the exhibition Alien Visions at Golsa, Roberts presents a new series of paintings generated around tropes of Scandinavian, and in particular, Norwegian, culture. They appear as perfectly snapped moments—like those you no longer frame and put on the shelf but edit and post online. Some are caught outside in weather ideal for the activity at hand, others in impeccable interiors. Roberts’ characteristic figures, with exaggerated long limbs and heads the size of those on a needle, move comfortably through different scenes of Norwegian landscapes. We see the skier in the trails, the anglers in a boat, the naked couple in the sauna, the mushroom pickers in the forest, the mountain cabin, the fjord cabin, and the lake cabin. Idealized renderings of imagined realities. As prime examples of Norwegian bliss. Where one still loves walking through the woods (but only with the right equipment), where the cabin has been running in the family for generations (but everything except the old fireplace has been removed), and where one can’t wait to spend a week in the mountains (but preferably from the comfort behind the glass of the new panorama windows that were installed during the refurbishing to bring “nature inside.”).

As an American who lives and works in Oslo, Charlie Roberts has observed and participated in the rituals of the modern Scandi from multiple perspectives. As the exhibition title also implies, the paintings entail a nerve that penetrates deeper than the slick finish of polished ideals. When speaking on the subject matter for this series, Roberts mentions the Vanitas tradition of Flemish painters in the Baroque. Translated as “vanity,” vanitas refers to still-life paintings occupied with notions of material vanity, human depravity, and the haunting echo of memento mori. With its moralistic and existential fundament, the motifs often operate as a choreographed chaos of objects with certain symbolic connotations, such as skulls, candles, and books, together with plants and food swarming with insects through various stages of decay. Yet, they appear ever so calm, beautiful, and inviting at first glance.

When approaching the works of Roberts, a sense of discomfort slowly crawls toward us. In Kitchen Cut where one figure is cutting the other’s hair on the counter of the oak-paneled kitchen, we see two bowls of fruit, an orange on the loose, and a suspiciously large snail on the windowsill in the room behind them. The well-dressed individual with one shoe and one slipper in Hytte Kaffe, overlooking the cat catching a mouse, holds a copy of Erling Kagge’s A Poor Collector’s Guide to Buying Great Art, while placing a cup of coffee on top of a copy of D2 on the table next to the Bialetti Espresso maker, a plated sandwich and another, this time half peeled, orange. For the gatherers of the forest in Skogs Trip, dressed in knee-high rubber boots and expensive high-tech attire, there is an overflowing 10L bucket of blueberries, a basket of assorted mushrooms, an expensive bottle of wine, and an almost full glass tipping over. Each of the two figures holds a giant mushroom, which is far into the process of being overrun by flies, ants, spiders, snails, butterflies, and even frogs. None of them seem to care about the ongoing frenzy.

A quirky substructure balances the constant shifts between the perfect and the weary that stretches even beyond the surface of the canvas. Amidst the principal acts of the scenes, we see miniatured people engaged in activities of their own, and tiny insects are fitted next to the artist’s signature on the frames. From the distorted proportions of the figures to the proximity of the different situations and their scenery, Roberts inserts a consistent use of humor that, with surreal tweaks combined, lightens the matter at hand.

With elements reminiscent of the surrealists, such as Leonora Carrington, who explored cultural mythologies and modes of the psyche through hybrid figurations and distorted landscapes, there is a resemblance of the rational being pulled apart. Moving further back into history, one sees similar tendencies of subtly breaking with mechanisms of sensible form and subject in the 15th century. This is particularly present in the works of Carlo Crivelli (c. 1435-1495), who, amid the most sacred of scenes with the Virgin and Child, included elements such as a very tiny woman, a snail, and a fly. 1 The woman is the size of the others’ calves, the snail is just there, and the fly appears to have landed on the painting – the latter of which is almost identical to Roberts’ rendering of insects on the frames. As we cannot specifically rationalize the presence of these pictorial deviations, they act almost as disguised cracks. Cracks of uncertainty that are prone to produce a laugh, a pause, or a hesitant sentiment.

One can describe the unfolding scenes in Alien Visions as a Norwegian version of The Stepford Wives—a perfect society synthesized from a proposed idea of the correct cultural capital, traditional awareness, and “hidden” financial means. In all its humbleness, Charlie Roberts morphs his pictorial language into a contemporary iconography linked to systems of the past and inherently present. The idealized images are stretched, modified, tweaked, and commented on through ceaseless relationships between the scenery, figures, and details. Biographically, in a sense, Roberts does not limit the paintings’ reach to a single culture but presents a case study of a phenomenon not subdued by time or locality, as he looks beyond the frame of his own gaze in their making.

- Pernille Dybvig

1 Carlo Crivelli, Virgin and Child, c. 1480 and Virgin and Child with Saints Francis and Sebastian, 1491