WOAW Gallery is pleased to announce its first participation at Kiaf SEOUL in September 2024, with American artist Charlie Roberts’ solo exhibition Pathways to Unknown Worlds at booth A36. It also celebrates both the artist and the gallery’s first presentation in Korea.
Charlie Roberts has engaged with landscapes in many of his previous works - visitors who examine his paintings will often see glimpses of green through a narrow window or slivers of blue between interacting figures, bits and pieces of nature amongst his various subjects crowded in the foreground. In his new series of works, Roberts moves from distinctive subjects to surreal landscapes as he explores vast, ethereal, and unexplored spaces. Like a force of nature, he allows the landscape to surge forth to the edges of the canvas, painting a sea of brushwork and oil that almost drowns the small figures within the space.
This shift marks a personal change in his mood - while Roberts seeks to encapsulate the overwhelming feeling of being small in an indifferent world, he also wishes to highlight a sense of awe at the majesty of nature. The open and atmospheric elements flowing through his paintings are related to the 70s experimental music he listens to as he works - the experimental music of Sun Ra and his Astro Infinity Arkestra, as well as the sci-fi illustrations and landscape art in his record graphics, captures and infuses his new perspective of space into his own sceneries. Their album Pathways to Unknown Worlds (1975) inspired the title of Roberts’ show as he seeks to channel the cosmic jazz seeking in Sun Ra’s music through characters trekking over epic landscapes. Finally venturing beyond the aperture of the windows in his previous scenes, it is as if Roberts aired out his canvas to breathe, opening pathways to unknown worlds.
Roberts draws references from travel photography and historical landscape painting, both mediums seeking to capture desirable, picturesque, almost mythical scenes. From American painter Winslow Homer’s palm trees to a photograph from a fishing trip in Vietnam, he first starts his work with one or two existing images in mind, and then weaves contemporary and traditional elements together to conjure a portal to an ideal natural world. From afar, the canvases appear to illustrate vast landscapes and vibrant scenery, a departure from Roberts’ previous paintings which are filled with large and distinctive subjects. Small in size, the works invite viewers to examine the different fantastical worlds he has conjured. Yet it is only when viewers peer closer that tiny figures will begin emerging within the scene - the last details painted onto the canvas, they serve as cosmic avatars of the viewers in Roberts’ surreal landscape, a microscopic reminder of our own existence.
Despite conceiving each work individually, Roberts’ worlds all interact with one another when hung together, filling the walls with multiple vibrant portals to different unknown worlds. His calm fields of color offer a sense of meditativeness, an open space for viewers to breathe - faced with a boundless and expansive landscape, one can only contemplate their place amongst the immeasurable power of nature.
