Willoughby Gerrish is very pleased to present ‘Locals’, an exhibition of new paintings by Robbie Fife.
‘Locals’ is a nod of the head to those people in Fife’s home village that maintain a life connected to the land. The paintings are a fond acknowledgement of the peculiar and sometimes derided activities that still endure in the lives of these eccentric neighbours. Dowsing, divining, metal detecting, egg collecting, seed sprinkling, wheelbarrow pushing protagonists all make an appearance. All are held in empathetic esteem.
The paintings take an idea expressed by Norbert Schwontkowski, regarding his painting ‘Collector’ (2009), as their impetus. Schwontkowski said of his protagonist:
“I’d always wanted to describe this collector, but I also want to make him pretty, which is the opposite of what we normally think of a collector: a poor man who collects things that people have thrown out. There is this very beautiful text from Bruce Chatwin about the collector which describes him not really as an ill person, but as a very strange person… And he’s a great person, so I want to put in something beautiful that would glorify him… I want to give him back his beauty.”*
This glorification of the unfashionable is the sentiment that Fife wishes to emphasise.
All the activities show a direct engagement with the earth and all are dependent upon what lies below its surface – a gardener works tied to a hole in the ground, scattered seeds are soon to find their way into the soil and a metal detector and divining sticks are used to discover what that soil holds. The last two are tools that bridge an invisible gap from above the earth to beneath it. One is quirky, one is supposedly debunked, both are peculiar. There is a temptation to view them as irrelevant; under the lens of empiricism dowsing is discounted and metal detecting could surely be considered a fringe interest. Many worthwhile endeavours get an undeserving boot but not all good things can be measured. These paintings celebrate the magic in the unmeasured and value that which is sometimes pointless.
Fife’s narratives are realised during the making, not preceding it, crucial hooks emerge simultaneously with more formal painting decisions. This organic growth leaves room for hesitation and tinkering before any narratives are settled on. His surfaces are laboured over; colours get tested, sanded, changed and shifted in tone. Areas and structures are sometimes built with collaged paper cutouts that have been previously used as test elements in older works. Reworking the materials and obsessing over minutiae in this way results in rich and often dense surface patinas, something that Fife is, in turn, absorbed by. The sustained and intensive painting surfaces that develop seem appropriate settings for grounding the artist’s uncanny characters.
* From an interview with Phong Bui for the Brooklyn Rail, 2009.
