Robin Megannity

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The possibility for intimacy, privacy and humility are what keeps painting plausible. But these things are absolutely unstable and confused by the seductions of their opposites; intimacy might be as effectively encountered through denial and detachment than through confession; Humility and tenderness are difficult to recognise amidst performativity, affectation, and melodrama.

 

In moments of belief, painting offers everything, in moments of doubt, I see the hoax. This is the uncertainty that keeps me painting; I look for artificiality in order to notice sincerity and I confess my apathy whilst sensitivity gushes around the back.

 

 The images that often form the focal point of my paintings are generated with digital technologies; cameras, 3D modelling software, or internet search algorithms. There exists a seductive type of melancholy that the digital image provides. The artificiality, the synthetics, and the barrier of the screen give a detachment and vacancy that produces a quality close to a fetish - an alluring and transgressive fixation with its remoteness and negation.

 

Historically, painting has had an unsteady relationship with artificiality; it is romantically understood as confidential and revealing however, conceit and self-awareness cannot be escaped. It is this oscillation between artificiality and intimacy, between indifference and earnestness, that pushes my work forwards. I allow for interruptions, hesitations, diversions, and reframings; I am aiming for an effect that recognises the seduction associated with artificiality and draws parallels between the apparent confidentiality offered by a  painting and the kind of intimacy that is tense and precarious.