Andrew Cornell Robinson: Salted Not Sugared

Press Release

Andrew Cornell Robinson is the 2023 grand-prize winner of the University Galleries’ national juried printmaking exhibition Ink, Press, Repeat. Cornell Robinson employs a multifaceted artistic approach encompassing oil painting, printing, drawing, and assemblage to explore queer and peculiar revisionist histories. His process involves over-painting with veils of color, gesture, and sgraffito, resulting in a layered effect akin to a simultaneous self-invention and erasure, and culminating in a distinctly queer process of camouflage and abstraction. This solo exhibition of new work and groups created over the last decade is organized around the artist’s reminder that not everything is what it seems, and presents Cornell Robinson’s concurrent evolution across diverse media as he investigates seriality, material culture, and persona.

The primary source material for Cornell Robinson’s present work is a collection of sketchbooks maintained for thirty years and containing daily observational drawings, mainly done on the subway, and recently digitized by a student assistant. A selection of phrases and images were laid out and scanned, and now serve as a working vocabulary. Line drawings were transferred to silkscreen using Rapidograph acetate pens and realized by master printer Luther Davis at Powerhouse Arts Printshop in 2015. These original drawings are presented in the exhibition under Plexiglas for the viewer’s reference, as a visual footnote of sorts, to the works on display.

Congregation of Wits was an important series of limited-edition prints completed in 2018 that brought these drawings, texts, and paint explorations together. The title comes from the Talking Statues of Rome, ancient fragments across the city that have been used since the sixteenth century as sites of anonymous political and social commentary. The colorful ham, or Jamón Ibérico which appears as a leitmotif across these prints, is a reference to Cornell Robinson’s travel between Rome, Madrid, and Granada around the time of creating Wits when he was reading Christopher Hitchens’ essay “A Short Digression on the Pig; or, Why Heaven Hates Ham.” The essay discusses porcophilia and the historical, coercive use of pork by Christian nations to oppress and “out” Jews and Muslims. Some of the idiomatic phrases and texts originated in randomized combinations of words from his digitized sketchbooks, others are bits of overheard conversation. He also mined corporate training books and motivational self-help books by author Louise Hay. His use of these images evolved further when he discovered the sheets used to clean the silkscreens created palimpsests that facilitated his pursuit of abstraction and obfuscation, layering the material toward total erasure. Cornell Robinson is interested in what information and emotion remains in these images and texts when they are obliterated.

In his ceramics, these images become underglaze decal transfers. Ceramics have always been part of his life and career; family members used to work in the historic Stangl Pottery in Trenton, NJ. In 2017 he created a series of grottoes that were shown at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, inspired by grottoes used for displaying religious statuary in the Catholic faith. These slip cast ceramic niches contain emptiness as opposed to a religious figure like the Virgin Mary, allowing the viewer to fill the space with their own imagined object of veneration. One example, Rebel Heart No. 2, employs an antique figural pressed glass bottle depicting George Washington that has been slumped under extreme heat into obscurity. During the COVID lockdown he turned out an impressive glut (a shed-full, to be exact) of chawans or ceremonial tea bowls, which reach a comical scale in My Cup Runneth Over. In his recent series Confabulation Fantabuloso he experimented with tin glaze and platter mold ceramics printed with photographic images.

His Bicameral Mind diptych canvases are a reference to Julian Jaynes’ bicameral mind hypothesis drawn from myths and historical literature. Jaynes posited that up until around 3,000 years ago, humans did not have a concept of introspection and internal thoughts and believed external forces and polytheistic gods guided our choices. Remnants of this way of thinking show up in our understanding of mental health and spirituality.

Another source of imagery comes from police sting surveillance footage captured clandestinely in 1962 in a men’s room in Mansfield, Ohio, now in the public domain thanks to another artist, William E. Jones. The footage captured men engaging in sexual acts and was used to frame and arrest them on charges of sodomy. This material is layered with floral still lives in his Vanitas series: “These 'portraits' symbolize the fleeting nature of pleasure, adorned with deliberate obfuscation through drawing and collage. Within these fractured abstractions and layers of obliteration, a visual lexicon emerges, depicting the dual nature of otherness and the perspective of being outside of and in between worlds.”

The title of the present exhibition is taken from an anonymous bit of graffiti employed during the May 1968 student demonstrations in Paris, memorialized in glass by the artist through gestural gilt script. He experimented with glass enamel printing during a 2015 residency at UrbanGlass in Brooklyn, utilizing a nineteenth-century technique to print silkscreen portraits with glass powder. The printed glass was then melted into hand rolled glass sheets, as in Marat Mahākāla Edition No. 4. That same year he turned to another unconventional medium for silkscreen prints in Burolandschaft, a plywood nod to the utopian postwar German office design movement that encouraged non-hierarchical mingling between employees at all levels of an organization using open plans without physical separation. Here each modular panel is printed with Cornell Robinson’s defiant scowl, establishing a protective barricade for the individual against conformity, which turns our accepted notions of the cubicle as a symbol of top-down control on its head.

Transfer printed ceramics and crumpled paper combine in assemblages in his current body of work, Queer Pentimento: “Inspired by the notion of erasure, a queer pentimento unravels the hidden narratives within social and cultural memory. I draw and print portraits, sites, and artifacts on canvas and metal substrates. Over-painting with veils of color, gesture, and sgraffito results in a layered effect, reminiscent of a pentimento.” Silkscreen prints mounted to tin sheets are crumpled, then mounted to the wall or draped over a ceramic head, obscuring the already abstracted image of the artist’s friend and AIDS activist Zachary, rendered in a Ben Day dot pattern from a photograph.

When brought together, Cornell Robinson’s output creates a complete environment that the visitor can inhabit, not merely a collection of unrelated series. Each evolution brings him back to his source vocabulary, through which clever observations about arcane history give way to ecstatic celebrations of what lies just below the surface of convention: “My aim is to not simply challenge conventional narratives but to invite viewers into a contemplative space where personal histories, social narratives, and abstractions collide. I believe that art can evoke curiosity, empathy, and emotional resonance, and it is within this intersection that my work finds its focus.”

Zhoosh-Omipalone (An artist statement in the form of a Polari* poem)

In the swish of my artistic sway,

Fabulist tales in hues array.

Queer glances in shadows play,

Abstracted Nancies, flirtations astray.

With brush and naff, a nifty dance,

Self-invention twirls, erasure's trance.

Layers weave, portraits on the chance,

Obscured, transformed, the setting sun's romance.

A recent romp under a frowning gaze,

Seductive whispers, secretive phrase.

Cottage lovers tango in the clandestine maze,

Flowery dreams lost in a fleeting haze.

Graffiti marks, a crafty cloak,

Obscure the essence, a clever stroke.

In fractured hues, a narrative bespoke,

Mincers' shadow winks through layers awoke.

Studio haven, a painter's trance,

Queer histories in rhythmic dance.

Layering, repetition, a visual chance,

Sketches veiled in hues, a nuanced advance.

From shadows hidden in cascading streams,

A queer abstraction, where memory teems.

In hushed voices, where the story gleams,

Our layers unveil, like spectral dreams.

-Andrew Cornell Robinson

Polari is a historic form of British slang, originating in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. It is predominantly used within English speaking gay subcultures as a secret language characterized by a playful “camp” and eclectic vocabulary. The vocabulary of Polari is diverse, drawing from a range of sources, including English, Romani, Italian, Yiddish, and rhyming slang. For example: Omipalone = homosexual; Zhoosh = exciting, attractive, etc.