Studio Visit: Robert Armstrong’s uncanny cohesiveness

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / When the distinguished contemporary Irish painter Robert Armstrong first occupied his space on the third floor of Temple Bar Studios in Dublin 40 years ago, as a co-founder of the complex, the area was subdued and undeveloped, like Soho in the 1970s or Tribeca in the 1980s. Now his studio overlooks a bustling courtyard in what has become a magnet for visitors to the city. In turn, Armstrong himself seems to embrace Ireland’s deep and introverted rootedness as well as its exalted and extroverted role in Western culture while also reaching liberally into other worlds – he has traveled all over, with art in mind, and eagerly plumbed art history – in fluid and delicately gestural canvases that at once fasten onto familiar visual tropes and depart for murkier and more speculative realms. How he manages this tension is, by general description, unsurprising: he makes resolutely abstract paintings that remain firmly underpinned by landscape in line and allusion. He strikes this balance, easier said than done, and even more remarkably sustains it, reflecting a thorough but unobtrusive understanding that, as Colm Toibin puts it in an eloquent essay for a book of Armstrong’s work, “nothing … is free of association.”

Especially prepossessing is the latest incarnation of a medium-sized painting, started many years ago, which features a turbulent sky rudely interrupted by a gaping, roughly oval void that he has painted an opaque and enigmatic sea green. Pushed to give the piece a name, he would call it simply A Painting with Green. Paintings can reach out to viewers or pull them in. This one does both. The incongruity of the green and the hole’s distorted geometry gnaw at viewers and demand consideration about just what traditional painted tableaux present and might imply: why is the void green and what lies beyond it? Toibin observes that “it is as though Armstrong began with certain fixed points and references and then moved inwards, into his own uncharted visual memory and imagination, all the time exploring, creating space, in the knowledge that something left out can have as strange a power as what is included.” That quality of agitation – the peskiness of something absent but sought – is a keynote for all of Armstrong’s work in its suggestion, often made but rarely as poignantly, that what is recognizable should only begin aesthetic inquiry. 

Armstrong has maintained discipline and balance through decades of painting, and they have bred considerable versatility. His paintings are not mere variations on visual themes but fall into discrete categories, all compelling. Diverging from A Painting with Green is the essentially monochromatic brown work Raw Umber – one of several similarly composed – which by its economical line intimates ships or dwellings against cascading clouds or cliffs and by its sepia-like tone a weary stoicism. Such works seamlessly fuse technical experimentation in color and mood with narrative painting. The latter gains sway with scale. A very large, richly evocative painting Armstrong cheekily calls The Big Nothin’ is anything but. In the extra space he indulges variegated and granular visual content and builds tactile and painterly surfaces. Decidedly abstract, the piece doesn’t necessarily conjure an Irish landscape, but the mottled greyish ridge hovering over a more colorful foreground does suggest ominous activity, human or other. 

Here again what Toibin calls “the stark drama of absence” takes hold. The inferences of dynamism and light that Armstrong’s purposeful withholding promotes can give rise to improbably Burchfieldian visions. The Big Nothin’ somehow reminded me of Kevin Barry’s audaciously gonzo novel City of Bohane, which telegraphs a rollicking, lawless Irish town of the near future animated by charismatic knaves and generational feuds. Across years, phases, and motifs, Armstrong’s work invariably invites contemplation and interpretation on this order of effusiveness. The result is remarkable aesthetic cohesiveness and consistency of impact – a painter’s truth.

Robert Armstrong, Dürer Editions, 2023 is available at Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin.

About the author: Jonathan Stevenson is a New York-based policy analyst, editor, and writer, contributing to the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and Politico, among other publications, and a regular contributor to Two Coats of Paint.