Robin Mitchell at Craig Krull Gallery
by Christopher Miles
L.A. Weekly
November 2009
Robin Mitchell’s latest exhibition offers a rare case study in how humble and subtle works (in this case a collection of modestly sized works in gouache on paper) can deliver an experience that is compelling, rich, intelligent and engaged with the array of traditions from which it descends and advances. Assembled of what one might call controlled gestures — casual yet deliberate marks — Mitchell’s paintings deal in the play of movement against stasis and symmetry. They get you going with horizontal eye movement, as if reading music or scanning a page (or scanning stacked horizons), as well as vertical movement, as if you’re watching lines roll by on a Teleprompter or data stream on a monitor. At times they seem almost to chirp and hum. But as much as they get you in the mode of watching a hustle-bustle, romantic, quasi-abstract world go by — imagine Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie crossed with the luminescent daubing of Monet and the relentlessness of a news wire — they also jump off the wall and drop away via a handling of color and ligh, which can make elements read as foregrounded object, middle space and void.
Radiant shapes, often centered in the compositions, and usually among the largest of elements employed, read simultaneously as starbursts, sunspots, dahlialike flowers, pompoms or the sorts of noses one finds on Muppets. The latter association isn’t at all off, given that as much as Mitchell’s project at times seems like an inversion of Chuck Close’s devotion to constructing portraits from the sum total of many tiny abstractions, with Mitchell seeming to build abstractions out of what seem like tiny vignettes of landscape, water and atmosphere, there is a striking facial quality to many of her paintings. It’s no accident. Mitchell’s as smart a painter as there is when it comes to the odd overlaps of the abstract, the nonobjective, the representational, the referential and the evocative. The repeated presence of elements that stand out in combination — via manipulation of color, scale and emphasis — as anthropomorphic, and that trigger the tendency in all of us to see things from hubcaps to houses as made in our image, is clearly a knowing aspect of her oeuvre.
The paintings stand simultaneously as catalogued landscapes, “field” paintings, iconic abstractions and surrogates for a more traditional presence of the figure. They awe in a way that connects them to Mitchell’s quite different but related contemporary Sharon Ellis, and to predecessors like Agnes Pelton and Charles Burchfield, whose current exhibition at the Hammer Museum, combined with Mitchell’s show, makes for a Westside art excursion of the sort of loveliness one might hope to find in the pairings by a good sommelier. They also push and pull you in and out like a Hans Hofmann painting one moment, get your eyes scanning the next, and then center you like a mandala. And they confront you and engage you with a near-human presence; they make you stare, and make you feel as if you’re looking into their eyes, though they really have none. In the end, you don’t really know how to look at them. In essence, they are shape-shifters, chameleons, grifters, and also mirrors, and they jerk you around in ways that can be pleasant, and even profound.
Craig Krull Gallery: 2525 Michigan Ave., B-3, Santa Monica (Bergamot Station Arts Complex) craigkrull.com.
Art in America
September 2007
By Constance Mallinson
ROBIN MITCHELL at Jancar Gallery
In this group of small gouaches on paper done over the last six years, Robin Mitchell draws from a lexicon of abstracted florals, vines, branches, sunbursts, buds, pods, microscopic life, ganglia and spermatozoa, all afloat on washy grounds of color. Compositions are either centrally organized in vortices to create pulsing moire or spinning effects, or dynamically lined up in vertical or horizontal patterns. The shapes are archetypal and recall forms from Egyptian hieroglyphics and stylized decorative borders, Eastern mandalas, early modernist abstraction or popular 1950s design motifs. With the chromatics high-keyed and close-valued-- like fluorescent spring greens and turquoises next to cadmium reds and oranges all laid down in the quick, assured strokes gouache requires--her images seem to vibrate and quiver in their electromagnetic fields.
Mitchell's heightened sense of the spirit and rhythms in nature is heir to Arthur Dove's and Charles Burchfield's investigations of a life force beyond mere appearances and their extension of Romantic nature philosophy into the 20th century. Mitchell strives for a similar mystical, transcendent quality but with the added influence of '60s psychedelia. Several of the "flower power" paintings, with their bold paint-stroke petals radiating from the center like ejaculatory starbursts, are layered over spirals, concentric circles, daubs and dots of paint or multicolored checkerboards, simulating the trance-inducing, ecstatic charge so associated with hippie esthetics. In an untitled work from 2004, hot-colored, leafless tree forms layered over thin brushy orbs and transparent veils of pigment spring up rankly, as if on the verge of outgrowing the confines of the paper. A 2006 work employs similar space-defying acts with its optically oscillating bands of warm and cool color at play in pools of tiny floating colored dots--like a visual translation of a musical score in which the notes and bars are polychromed and infinitely tiered. Both a highly energized surface and an illusion of deep space at once, the painting invites meditation on states of consciousness as well as the cosmos.
If Mitchell seems too nostalgic for the sincerity of early modernism or the '60s subculture's belief that encounters with altered states would open minds to effect critical change, her work is nevertheless notable for its visionary power. At a time when, as philosopher David Michael Levin claims, we are "crying for a vision" to reconstruct our relationship with the environment, the use of archetypal "transhistorical" patterns such as Mitchell's can transform our sense of vision. Whether seeking to connect the human psyche more deeply with its natural sources or presenting a rapturous response to the beauty of organic form, she makes these small paintings seem epic.