SIX EASY PIECES

[If you are interested in purchasing a work, please contact the gallery for more information.]

UPPER MARKET GALLERY is pleased to present “Six easy pieces,” an exhibition of paintings by Sam Robbins.

April 14 & 15

opening reception: Friday, April 14, 5 - 8pm

open hours: Saturday, April 15, 12 - 5pm

In these paintings-from-drawings-from-life, Robbins illustrates his world with diaristic intimacy. Depictions of his home, his partner, the back of his own hand are rendered in line drawings, giving structure to flat swaths of color. In Sam’s Hand, pastel yellows and purples play against the black and blue of his sleeve. The pink outline of the hand is concise in detail, defining the space without creating clutter. In Leopard Coat Profile, there is a swiftness and spontaneity in the quality of each stroke — the suggestion of an ear, the brushed marking of bristles on canvas. Beauty is borne of this lucid simplicity.

An avid surfer, Robbins paints the sea with immersive familiarity and attunement to luminosity. These works evoke the salty air, and the crisp, chromatic light of California. His awe and admiration of the ocean is eminent in First Person Surfer as the waves wrap around the viewer, or in Homage to the Green Ray as the storied emerald flash appears on the Big Sur skyline. The sparseness of his rendering elicits a physical response that starts subtle and blooms. Each painting is felt in body and in mind.

The show finds its namesake in the 1970 film Five Easy Pieces, in which Jack Nicholson’s character renounces his upper class background to live a humble blue-collar existence as an oil rig worker. This title aptly juxtaposes the inherent physicality and manual labor of painting, against the ease with which we are able to parse each piece. The work is not superficial — far from it — but it forgoes pretension in favor of a clarity and directness that lets the viewer reach the core feeling of the work. Here, visual intricacy is not a correlate of spiritual complexity; rather, meaning arises through humility, simplicity and sparsity.

“Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” Such is the simple grace of Six Easy Pieces. Robbins’ work is an invitation not to try, not to contend with esoteric references, sentimentality, headiness or haughtiness; an invitation to view these images with ease, to feel, effortlessly and immediately, but deeply. Robbins’ paintings are flashes of transcendence in small everyday moments; artifacts dropped from the eternal present. He gives us a lens through which we may see the world, “without wobbling; unwavering, unapologetically; empty and marvelous.”

Text by Annie Dauber