Untitled X-Ray Translation Print

Paul O Robinson grew up on the Atlantic coast of North Florida amongst a family of taxidermists and concert and circus musicians. He began his university education in music theory and composition, and from there he changed course to serve a traditional five-year apprenticeship with a master pattern-maker; afterwards he opened his design studio within which he began to develop work that would direct him again to university, this time for art and architecture. The intersection of artistic process and architectural theory suggested alternative ways to practice and to teach. Robinson has been actively teaching and maintaining his studio since 2000. In 2009 he received a Fulbright fellowship to Slovenia where he focused on developing entirely new work that excavated existing spatial environments using X-Ray technology. Often with the X-Ray as a substrate, he developed processes to transform both two and three-dimensional artifacts into individual artworks—radiographs, paintings and sculptures—and recomposed spatial installations. Each artwork emerges as a material correspondence with the spaces and objects Robinson explores; in this respect all works have their own individual—non-homogeneous—narrative and material language. Robinson now permanently resides and works in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Robinson is deeply private. His work is a painstakingly personal journey and has not until 10 years ago been offered to the public realm. Since then he has held residencies and his work has been exhibited in Museums and galleries in the US and Italy, in particular, Venice, Italy. His work is in collections in Europe and the US. Currently he is working with Venice's Fortuny Museum on a long-term project that will be exhibited in 2021. As an artist—a maker of things—Robinson has a deep respect for tools and the traces that both the conventional and unconventional use of tools bring to the process of materializing the invisible. His installations and their constituent pieces often emerge from intensive forensic explorations—a museum, a crime scene, a house…a room—using X-Ray technology; in turn the critical X-Ray—the tool—excites, perhaps enlivens is more apt, both the inanimate and narrative presences within the spaces and objects bombarded by the X-Ray beam. In a nanosecond the invisible X-Ray forcibly dismisses superficial countenances and with controlled technicality illuminates deeper spaces and their shadowy structures.