In the Absence of Light Painting

Surrealist Painter The paintings of Robert Vanderhorst envision a world where psychological, social and material processes are intimately entwined. While figurative, his work typically rejects static pictorial spaces and linear narratives. Instead, a cumulative, serial or recombinant approach is evident in much of his work. The resulting imagery is alternately familiar and estranged, direct and mediated, traditional and unconventional. At play are subjects that are suspended in an imaginary environment that creates an implicit tension in the painting. Vanderhorst's environments are both transformative and in the process of transformation "” perpetually perched on the edge of becoming something else.