Painting a performance – that has been previously enacted privately in the artist’s studio or precariously in more public settings - is what John Robinson has been focused on through his practice. He studies the human psyche through its’ rituals and ceremonies and even its less appealing self-congratulatory manifestations. Robinson often portrays himself behind a mask to gain access to the most obscure parts of human pathology where embarrassment, empathy, cruelty and humiliation - but also the sublime - reside.
As stated by the curator Domenico de Chirico: “...for Robinson, painting is a disguise. The main aim of his practice is to use the images of his self-portraits as a way to become invulnerable to the inexorability of time, which he imprints on the surfaces of his paintings with magnificent acuity".
