Micheline Robinson
‘A moment of reflexion’ by Micheline Robinson $1,500 Status: Available
Throw caution to the wind $5,800 Status: Sold
Going With The Flow $5,800 Status: Available
Resume about the works:
“My practice dwells in the liminal space between the swift, fluid stroke of the pictorial and the resolute presence of sculptural form. Working with layered acrylic ink on metal, the flat panel defies its own boundaries, swelling into illusionary depth through gesture, colour, and light plays. These paintings refuse to remain purely pictorial as they push against the rectangle, breathing and sagging at the edges as if trying to step into real space. They are threshold beings that probe the outsider condition, never fully belonging to painting or to sculpture, forever slipping across borders of medium and identity, asking where a mark is allowed to become flesh and still remain a picture.”
Micheline Robinson’s recent artworks began with a quiet, almost playful challenge to herself. In an age when AI can generate flawless images in seconds, could she still, using only her mind’s eye, a brush, and large metal panels, no references, make something that feels alive, luminous, and capable of provoking and reclaiming the one faculty that remains, for now, stubbornly human: the capacity to experience awe. Working exclusively by hand on large aluminium panels, without photographic references or digital projection, she asked whether unassisted perception and paint could still generate convincing spatial illusion and, more crucially, the visceral shiver that accompanies genuine wonder.
At first the paintings presented solitary, abstract life-forms seemingly enclosed inside trompe-l’œil boxes, as though specimens paused for study. The motif carried gentle echoes of laboratory curiosity, of post-pandemic isolation, and of the artist’s own expatriate experience of encountering the new. These painted illusions of containment arose from a sustained inquiry into what consciousness, embodiment, and wonder meant at a moment when human brain organoids were already being wired to play Pong and the transhumanist promise of merger felt both inevitable and ethically unexamined.
Then, in a liberating gesture, Robinson took a blade to the metal itself. The painted boxes were physically carved away, the containing edges broken open, and the creatures allowed to drift into expansive, indeterminate space. What had been containment became release. Illusionary depth was joined by actual breach. Now depending on where the viewer stands, the panels appear translucent, softly bulging, or almost three-dimensional, yet they never surrender their resolute flatness. Up close the eye drowns in vibrating colour and tactile incident; from farther away coherent, breathing presences emerge. With time, Robinson lets figuration dissolve entirely into sensuous tides of colour and form. The mood is celebratory, intimate, almost tidal and an invitation to linger in the sheer pleasure of looking at something undeniably handmade and alive. It is a place to pause, to feel light move across metal, to watch freed organisms hover between familiarity and mystery, and to remember the quiet power of human presence in a world increasingly crowded with flawless simulations
“My practice dwells in the liminal space between the swift, fluid stroke of the pictorial and the resolute presence of sculptural form. Working with layered acrylic ink on metal, the flat panel defies its own boundaries, swelling into illusionary depth through gesture, colour, and light plays. These paintings refuse to remain purely pictorial as they push against the rectangle, breathing and sagging at the edges as if trying to step into real space. They are threshold beings that probe the outsider condition, never fully belonging to painting or to sculpture, forever slipping across borders of medium and identity, asking where a mark is allowed to become flesh and still remain a picture.”