New York painter Walter Robinson has been exhibiting since the early 1980s. There is a whole mythology of the East Village Scene™ among New York Baby Boomers that took place in the late seventies and early eighties. While it did give us Haring, Scharff and most importantly Basquiat, the proof it was little more than a giant cud of overpopulation working its way through the culture was that it died the minute the last boomer turned 32 (approximately 1985). Between age 27 and 32 is when if you haven’t established an independent success you give up and get a real job, become homeless, return to the shit-hole you came from with your tail between your legs, or accelerate the installment plan your suicide is riding on. So most people who “try out the art world” do so until they get a good gallery, a professorship, a post at a non-profit or they turn 33. Mythologizers of the East Village Scene™, of which there is a cottage industry in upstate New York, will blame AIDS for its demise when the culprit for ending the party was AGE.
Walter Robinson is a survivor of that scene which means he is both an aging Boomer (which he cannot help) because he was there and an interesting painter (something that cannot be said for the lion’s share of the East Village Scene™) because he is here, now. Now being 2022 and Here being the Charlie James Gallery in L.A.’s Chinatown and more precisely CJ2, Charlie’s new annex. And the best proof that he is far from just an aging boomer resting on his laurels is the virility evident in every brushstroke of his ESCAPE TO ADVENTURE solo show at CJ2. This is an exhibition that takes testosterone to its most logical conclusion: a death at one’s physical peak after climaxing in adventures with the deadly power of the opponent in the war of the sexes OR the challenges of chemical opponents who destroy us slowly as time passes on the coasting down of life’s highway into senior citizen discount valleys and beyond.
The curating of these all new (2022) paintings, uncredited but assumed to be by Mister James, auspiciously divides things between the two. The first, larger room in the new gallery -which is an historic space in Los Angeles gallery lore as the site of Roger Hermann’s Black Dragon Gallery, a pioneering Chinatown contemporary art exhibition space and many others, most recently, pre-pandemic, Lisa Derrick Fine Arts – has paintings of the point of no return while at one’s peak, usually on adventure. There are guns being drawn by dames on men, manly men, there are men being thrown into the fire by women, madly lustful women. What a way to go! The smaller back room is mostly paintings of the things by which we do ourselves in, years after our time has come and gone and we did not die before we got old. These luscious paintings of liquor cabinets and pill bottles have an emptiness that is the opposite of that first buzz these substances all bring but sustain with a sublime joy in painting that so much art out in the word today all lecturing us totally misses.
And that’s what Walter Robinson’s forty years of exhibitions has stood for, an oeuvre of taking joy in painting to the point that no experienced viewer can miss. Those viewers, like you if you get your ass down to Chinatown and see this fucker, they see paintings like Robinson’s and take some of that joy with them. Perhaps Walter Robinson teaches them (you) to see it in other paintings, later on, down the road at other galleries at studios and museums where it is more difficult to spot. Some artists are just seizing the notion of taking each brushstroke to the precipice of death and letting that ignite their output, can you spot those instances? Hone your aesthetic on Walter Robinson’s paintings and you will! So in that regard, Walter Robinson is a gateway drug to surrendering one’s self to painting, that immortal escape to adventure.
The show runs thru July 16, 2022, you gotta go see it.