Jimmy Robert
Technique et Sentiment
03 Aug - 04 Sep 2021
Jimmy Robert’s conceptually-driven practice encompasses performance, photography, film and sculpture. The exhibition ‘Technique et Sentiment’ presents a new series of photographs and a sound installation, made on-site at Tanya Leighton, Berlin. The artist has continually offered up his own body to encounters with unhomely and unyielding institutional spaces. For Robert, this performative element of his work is about reclaiming the representation of his body. In ‘Technique et Sentiment’, Robert inhabits the white-walled gallery space in all of its historically construed dimensions, approaching it with a critical, queer, postcolonial perspective. His presence empathetically attends to legacies of colonial erasure and histories of invisibility in Western visual culture by subtly asserting its own indeterminacy and complexity.
Robert has selected objects, photographic images, drawings, and fragments of raw materials from his archive, which he has collaged in the gallery. He poses with these constellations and the whole scene is then photographed. These stylised compositions reveal the body in, and among, fragments in processes of recomposition. A hand appears to hold a folded textile in place. A leg echoes the orientation of an object, with playful or erotic intent. The resulting images express their own inner narratives. In one photograph Robert is lying with an outstretched arm cradling a glossy, nectarine-coloured queen conch shell from his native Guadeloupe. Emptied of its vulnerable occupant — fished close to extinction and exported globally — this redundant protective layer is imbued by Robert with tenderness and care. In another photograph, there is a reproduction of realist Constantin Emile Meunier’s late nineteenth century bronze sculpture of a dockworker, not depicted at work, but posing casually in contrapposto, hands sensually resting on tilted hips. Robert’s appropriation queers the image further by coupling it with a portrait of his partner, Matthias re-performing the body language of the labourer.
The images are printed onto heavy cotton matte paper, their fibrous, textured surfaces rejecting the sublimation of the glossy photograph. Hung from batons or supported by pedestals, the images float in front of the gallery’s walls and floor, reaching out with a sculptural proposition. The works in ‘Technique et Sentiment’ engage in an ongoing transposition and translation between form, media, bodily gesture, and materiality. Paper is a significant material here. It pervades the space palpably. ‘Technique et Sentiment VI’ is a sound recording of the artist handling a long roll of powder pink paper. Rolling it. Stepping over it, and dancing with it, his breath becoming deeper with exertion. As in the photographs, the body is abstracted. Present in this particular exhibition space, but not in this moment.
Robert has selected objects, photographic images, drawings, and fragments of raw materials from his archive, which he has collaged in the gallery. He poses with these constellations and the whole scene is then photographed. These stylised compositions reveal the body in, and among, fragments in processes of recomposition. A hand appears to hold a folded textile in place. A leg echoes the orientation of an object, with playful or erotic intent. The resulting images express their own inner narratives. In one photograph Robert is lying with an outstretched arm cradling a glossy, nectarine-coloured queen conch shell from his native Guadeloupe. Emptied of its vulnerable occupant — fished close to extinction and exported globally — this redundant protective layer is imbued by Robert with tenderness and care. In another photograph, there is a reproduction of realist Constantin Emile Meunier’s late nineteenth century bronze sculpture of a dockworker, not depicted at work, but posing casually in contrapposto, hands sensually resting on tilted hips. Robert’s appropriation queers the image further by coupling it with a portrait of his partner, Matthias re-performing the body language of the labourer.
The images are printed onto heavy cotton matte paper, their fibrous, textured surfaces rejecting the sublimation of the glossy photograph. Hung from batons or supported by pedestals, the images float in front of the gallery’s walls and floor, reaching out with a sculptural proposition. The works in ‘Technique et Sentiment’ engage in an ongoing transposition and translation between form, media, bodily gesture, and materiality. Paper is a significant material here. It pervades the space palpably. ‘Technique et Sentiment VI’ is a sound recording of the artist handling a long roll of powder pink paper. Rolling it. Stepping over it, and dancing with it, his breath becoming deeper with exertion. As in the photographs, the body is abstracted. Present in this particular exhibition space, but not in this moment.