In the paintings of Robert Walker there is that boundary between reality and the artist’s imagination, which is able to set some on the wave of real life, and others — to bring the creator’s thoughts to the pulsating nerve.

If we set the task and characterize the style of Robert Walker in one phrase, then perhaps it would be most appropriate to call it "the style of Robert Walker." And it will be quite difficult to find parallels to "neo-popart", "neo-abstractionism" or "transavantgarde". Perhaps, in this one wording "the style of Robert Walker" will be the uniqueness of his worldview, the special optics of his perception.

An exceptionally important quality of Walker’s work seems to be the large format of his work, and in small works — the potential for them to go to a large format. In a world where we often scrupulously and carefully look for the same flaws, when the details seem to be just a manifestation of imperfection, the brilliance and luminosity of pure colors and Walker’s large open color spots reveal the primordial nature of our feelings and sensations, making them meaningful to us again.

The landscapes of Robert Walker seem to be portals to another, heavenly reality, on which, according to the poet, we are stepping for the first time. These are portals into which you enter naked in soul and body, with the timidity of the uninitiated, but leave them cleansed and, perhaps, initiated into the secrets of the universe.

Despite the airiness and luminosity of Walker’s canvases, each centimeter of them has the density of the venous grid of being. The sky is often absent in the composition of landscapes, and like children’s drawings, they sometimes show an absolute unwillingness to discover the possible emptiness of the world. But every stroke, every spot in Walker’s paintings speaks of a fierce and indomitable thirst to live, to search, to explain the phenomena, signs and meanings that arise in the world.

The combination of large bright spots with linear diagonals in Walker’s paintings often gives rise to self-organizing spaces that already live according to their own laws. In "RICE FIELD SEMI ABSTRACT" the swirling spirals of paths, furrows and patches of fields create such a dynamic of color and graphic lines that, behind the pattern of a particular landscape, generates a kind of fractals — ornaments capable of reproducing themselves.

In "TEMPLE PATHWAY" and "WALKING TO THE TEMPLE" the color emerging from the depth itself sets and forms the compositional-plot canvas of the picture. Decorative, bright, saturated colors determine the rhythm of simple motifs: either a road going into the depths, or female figures walking towards the viewer with baskets on their heads, or a temple, which occupies most of the canvas with its geometric array in "TEMPLE AT SUNSET".

The European eye, accustomed to the rarefied air and close tones of the colors of nature, of course, in the paintings of Robert Walker faces some other reality: fluorescent, neon colors, incomprehensible contrasts of the play of shadows and light that create their own ornaments. Slender algorithms of spots, entering into a roll call with each other, give rise to those pictures of life that open the world into different levels of elements and being.

Robert Walker’s ability to comprehend the world, bypassing a clear figurative reality, to transform the motifs of nature (palm trees, lianas, reed shoots, bamboo) playing its indefatigable diversity into large color spots and their contrast creates Walker’s recognizable style, in which the capacity and integrity of the artist’s vision remove the boundaries between the European world and the exotic world of East Asia.


Anastasia Bezgubova
a member of The International Association of Art Critics (AICA)