Let’s get lost
Lost in each other’s arms
Let’s get lost
Let them send out alarms
Let’s Get Lost, Chet Baker
Paint can clearly be disorderly – yet off the shelf, seductively packaged in its shiny taut tube, it feels neat and contained, spring-loaded with potential. However, once liberated, its nature and behaviour shifts, so that if this unruly material is to morph into a meaningful carrier of subject, content and impact, it’ll need coercion and finessing and all with the help of a brush and a knife.
I know Robert Malherbe welcomes these unreasonable challenges. Looking at his gloriously viscous paintings one can imagine his excitement as the pigment emerges from its cocoon – immediately expanding in search of a transformative state. All that is required is imagination, cognition, dexterity, judgement, sensitivity, patience, touch, and time. Ought to be easy.
Trouble is when one looks at painting often, it seems that most have access to, at best, just a few of these attributes. Few access all, and fewer still have any in abundance. We’re convinced that Robert Malherbe has been blessed with the full buffet, but the paintings are not driven by the desire to display nor indulge these capacities. In fact, Malherbe’s paintings are determinedly modest. What he regards is often familiar, unsurprising – even when they are intimate – the manner in which he uses paint to build a material metaphor is humble and honest, and therein lies its power.
“What I’m trying to do with painting is take in this visual world and make something of it that is uniquely mine”
Robert Malherbe
EXHIBITIONS
Malherbe’s painting rests fundamentally on swift, perceptive observation rather than the ‘patient’, (read laborious) scrutiny. The latter is more likely to end in competent description and that’s way less interesting. What he sets out to secure is a fugitive state that captures the energy and torsion of what’s in front of him – exactly the quality that is the first causality of description.
In a sense, paint is not well suited to stasis, and many, having let it out of the tube, then try to tame it, as if they want to put it back in… indeed, the idea that an inherently unstable visual world might best be analysed and made sense of by an unruly, viscous material wed to an utterly irrational process is odd, but then happily, so is painting.
Painting as he does, both ‘plein air’ and from ‘life’ in the studio, means there are constraints of time and conditions. This simultaneous compression and attenuation of time is one of the allures of “getting lost” in making (and looking at) a painting. The visual data required to make a good painting is extensive, but the expression is a kind of shorthand. The best paintings seem to fold these seemingly competing notions into the material, so that they can be both immediate and fresh, and yet carry a patina and dimension that stretches time. I have the sense looking at Robert Malherbe’s paintings, that his relationship to making is a love affair, just as Baker describes, Robert wilfully gets lost, lost in the arms of painting.
That he returns time and again to these subjects may be less about their intrinsic qualities, and more about absorbing and understanding the way that he himself sees and re-adjusts the coordinates of vision and understanding that he has come to rely on. But as I say this, why wouldn’t one wish to religiously regard a sunset, a flower or the curve of a hip?
