Jimmy Robert Brown Leatherette

Jimmy Robert’s art is memorable both for its formal beauty and its esoteric and sometimes seemingly incidental narratives. The body (often his own) frequently provides the initial focus of his work. However, what becomes apparent is that the subject portrayed is being represented not just by one privileged form, be it film, photography or performance, but also through the literal or inferred presence of another medium. A live performance involving Robert may be transmitted via a video recording, or Robert’s physical presence as a performer may be accompanied by a film projection. Equally, photographs can assume a painterly nature, or compositions reminiscent of photographic portraiture, may exist within the confines of a short film.

The dexterity and enjoyment so evident in Robert’s image making is intended to be more than merely pleasing to the eye. Writing on Robert’s work, Christopher Kool-Want has observed that ‘Robert is desperately troubled by beauty, not least by the type of beauty which he creates with almost effortless ease in his films’. The attention Robert gives to his chosen mediums suggests that they are more than a means to an end, more than simply conduits for his commentaries on the self, desire, memory and displacement. Alternatively, such is the nature of Robert’s image making that we cannot easily distinguish between what constitutes the narratives of content and the narratives of form. What Robert presents are parallel narratives that produce each other’s meaning. In the words of Kool-Want, such dynamics within the work ‘prevent an over-indulgence and sentimentalisation of beauty.’

When Robert speaks of his work gravitating towards ‘the empty space between materiality and representation’, his photographic use of film, or his collapsing of the live with the recorded, begins to make sense. The ‘empty space’ suggests something less tangible than the real or the representational world, something psychic perhaps, invisible to our eyes but not necessarily to our minds. It is not a space of nothingness, for to imagine nothing is still to imagine something.  Therefore, perhaps this space is empty only inasmuch as it is devoid of visual activity. But it is profoundly embedded in our understanding of our material and representational world. It is as if for Robert the simultaneous use of the potent, but sometimes unsatisfactory, forces of the material and representational world can elicit an experience of something that will never appear.

Richard Hylton, August 2002

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