Brian Despain returns to the gallery with a new set of paintings from his 100 Robots series. While his painterly work retains a dark humor, these new paintings belie also a sense of melancholy, stemming from recent issues in the artists life. He places his depiction of the "everyman" as robot in bleak situations and landscapes that look ready to storm. Painted in hurricane-cloud greys and blues and sulphurous post-apocalyptic yellows, the robot "protagonists" blunder their way across tumultuous landscapes, thrilled by a newly discovered concept of "self" yet haunted with the dawning realization of their fatal disconnection from the life which surrounds them. Religion, as well as social and personal politics are depicted in allegorical terms, and Brian often uses a symbolic visual vocabulary within his image making.Each painting is meant to provoke introspection into one's own existence and begs further examination of the collective human condition.
