WOAW Gallery is delighted to be returning to the 2023 edition of Untitled Art Fair at Miami Beach, presenting a focused exhibition of Charlie Roberts’s new series of paintings this year. In a 2023 interview with the Head of Louisiana Literature Christian Lund for the Louisiana Museum of Art, Charlie Roberts comments on what makes a good painting: “At a certain point, you can make an image in Photoshop, and you can copy it perfectly. Painting like that is a skill that can be learned. Anybody can figure it out. So, there’s gotta [sic.] be something else besides the technical side of it.” This acute awareness of what his predecessors have done in painting and the fungibility of images today punctuates the original energy with which Roberts picks up the brush. With this dichotomy in mind, the artist revisits and reimagines one of the key signifiers of genre painting: the kitchen.
All languages hold dreams, and within the idiom of literature and art, the kitchen not only connotes a space of creation and communion but opens its inhabitant to the promise it holds: a series of adventurers, misunderstandings, and intimacies that can play out within the psychic realm of the site. And it is this narrative that compels Roberts in his new body of work.