ROBYN O'NEIL

For almost twenty years, artist Robyn O’Neil has been building a world in which the illogical constant of human violence contends with the ungovernable majesty of nature, the sublime. Diligently rendered, O’Neil’s vast landscapes provide an arena in which hordes of middle-aged white men wreak collective havoc on the environment...

Robyn O’Neil’s fourth exhibition with the Gallery marks a departure in process, a deconstruction of the visual and material, and an aesthetic genesis for the artist. Named for “an unkindness,” the term used to reference a flock of ravens, the exhibition impresses upon the viewer a sense of foreboding and threat that is reinforced by the centerpiece triptych, An Unkindness. Life on Earth is arduous and fraught with challenge.

While Yoakum likely visited many of the sites depicted, first with the circus and later the army and merchant marines, it is the surreal quality of his renderings that suggests these drawings are more than meets the eye. Yoakum’s work has held sway over artists from the time it was first exhibited in Chicago in the late 60’s, championed by the likes of Leon Golub, Ray Yoshida, Gladys Nilsson…and more recently by a younger generation rediscovering these Midwestern pioneers, Robyn O’Neil among them.

In her third solo show with the Gallery, Robyn O'Neil returns to the raw materials and tools that have endured to supply her simplest and most profound statements over the course of her career — large-format, graphite on paper — rendering human bodies and landscape in relationship, from beginning to end. O’Neil seems to have conceptually started over in the years that followed, returning to bare landscape, quiet rolling space, and the hope of new beginnings — a fitting run up to the re-introduction of the human image in this recent cycle.

As intimated in the title of the exhibition, O’Neil conjures a place still in dramatic formation, witnessed in different or even parallel stages of becoming. Less concerned with narrative, the artist’s interest lies in capturing a sense of mystery inspired by the natural world. O’Neil builds up turbulent grounds from powdered graphite smudged and then partially erased before layering on oil pastel. This technique creates depth and a delicate play of luminosity and tactility while managing to convey darkened psychological states.

As befits the subject, “HELL” represents Robyn O’Neil’s largest and arguably most complex work to date. At 14’ long, incorporating over 35,000 collage elements and 65,000 figures, the project is both a literal and figurative odyssey. Drawn features are interspersed with cut paper to create a dense multidimensional space. In O’Neil’s “HELL”, a somber narrative unfurls, drawing the viewer into a world of robed figures and sweat-suit clad men clambering to exit their terrifying and gruesome existence.