Jeff Robb | Beyond Naked (Selected Works 2008-2018)
Pontone Gallery presents a retrospective of British artist Jeff Robb’s compelling work. This is a unique opportunity to view a comprehensive selection of his lenticular photographs made over the last ten years. Internationally successful and award-winning, he is an acknowledged expert in this form of image making.
His primary subject is the human body. Posed in ways which articulate the gracefulness of the moving form, his models jump, flex and fall. In a series of images they contort and stretch themselves within the geometric confines of a rigid structure, exploring the limits of their ability to occupy the space. This is a sensuous and opulent world: his subjects are good-looking, athletic exemplars of physicality. The photographs express the lush texture, tone and contour of their skin, muscle and bone-structure in all its gleaming corporeality. The dense and subtle tonal range articulates their chiaroscuro form with all the expressive affect of baroque painting.
The lenticular technique, where multiple exposures of captured images are printed onto a lens-like surface, makes an illusion of movement. Robb consciously exploits this effect to express, what he describes as, the ‘liminal’ quality of his images. The subject is in flux, moving from one state to another. Caught at a threshold, at a moment of possible transformation, self-absorbed in their action, they are forever hovering in the present.
An immanent sense of control permeates these photographs. We see it in the self- possession and athleticism of the subject, the sophisticated ‘theatre of production’ and in the mastery of the craft of the camera. These images embody the struggle to capture and contain the fleeting and evanescent, to grab hold of and identify an instant of beauty before it decays and fades from sight.
Robb shows us the history of his thorough investigation into the possibilities of the lenticular photograph. It has allowed him to explore themes of eroticism, control and the liminal. We see his enquiry span across subject matter, probing the potential of the medium, bringing to light startling images of glowing radiance and emphatic weight.
