Andrew Roberts

I am constantly making new work and destroying it. Anything I make that has a story, or a cultural attachment or an emotion is discarded.

The only work I seem to allow myself to remain are natural pigment dot and mosaic paintings. The composition must be geometric and the colour monochromatic. I also execute simple observational pencil drawings, which have no narrative or point of view. The work is not creative and not expressive. It is constructed.

I am trying to make work that has always existed and will always exist. I want the paintings to be eternal and to always be without a narrative or a cultural identity. The works are also anti-nature because they represent an ideal and not reality.

I take from nature but want to surpass nature. The drawings are only about light. I don’t care what I draw and am not trying to tell a story.

I don’t sign my works as I don’t want to be part of the artwork,
I want the viewer to take ownership of the work.

The dot paintings evolved from a body of work in which I worked with Zulu woodcarvers in 2007. In those works I sanded the sculptures of the woodcarvers for prolonged periods of time.

It became evident to me that putting time into works gave them a quality didn’t exist in other works I had produced. 

The dot paintings are a containment of time in a structure that was developed to be without a narrative and culturally neutral. As in the surface of an extensively sanded piece of wood. 

The paintings are constructed of a triangular grid on which circles are placed, and the whole is contained within a rectangular frame. 

The structure and repeated use of the motif are an intended continuation of the work and ideas of Niele Toroni as a “found object”.

Andrew Roberts May 2021