Double Back Around
Robert Robbins
Double Back Around is a solo exhibition by Robert Robbins that explores retraced steps, recursive thinking, and moments of uncertainty. The looping rhythms of memory, perception, and movement echo through composition and technique across both monumental paintings and intimate drawings that reimagine the context of landscape. What results is a world that feels both immediate and remembered, grounded in natural sensation yet charged with the complexity of contemporary life.
Robbins' paintings invite viewers into a heightened sensory state where the boundaries between experience and environment dissolve. In reference to philosopher Jean Baudrillard's concept of hyperreality, the works layer abstraction and representation so thoroughly that their origins blur - forgoing the tradition of static capture and rendered moment in favor of a more living field, reactive to the visual excavation of the viewer.
The canvases are infused with the velocity of travel and the fleeting nature of experience. They conjure sensations of being in multiple states at once—physically in motion, psychologically elsewhere—while pulling viewers into the ephemera of landscapes half-seen and half-recalled. Robbins captures the tension between stillness and speed, permanence and impermanence, the remembered and the imagined.
These exhibited works remain deeply tied to the contemporary social experience, shaped in the wake of the pandemic and an increasingly fragmented digital age. Whereas Robbins' post-2008 paintings sought to create lush, radiant worlds of escape in response to collective crisis, this new body of work complicates the very notion of escapism. The layered, shifting surfaces reflect the simultaneity of our current era—screen-mediated, multi-tasked, and uncanny—inviting viewers to navigate terrain that feels at once intimate and distant, and to reconsider what it means to seek refuge in an age where escape is itself fractured.
Rooted in natural imagery, the works engage with humanity's relationship to wilderness; exploring how the land is perceived, internalized, and fragmented by memory and technology. Small, unexpected details surface amid broader atmospheric fields, reflecting the interplay of focus and distraction. In turn, the paintings resonate with a visceral energy—part meditative, part disorienting, part soulful—that holds the viewer in their shifting depths.
For me personally, this exhibition carries special meaning. Robbins was one of my professors at the Columbus College of Art & Design, where he taught me in several advanced painting courses. To now present his work at No Place Gallery is both an honor and a full-circle moment.
- James MS
Robert Robbins (b. 1968) is a visual artist living and working in Mason, Ohio, and Professor of Art at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He received his MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale University in 1992 and his BFA in Fine Arts from the Columbus College of Art and Design.
Robbins' large-scale paintings explore contemporary relationships to land and travel, appearing straightforward at first glance but inviting deeper reflection on our place within the world. His work has been recognized with fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Greater Columbus Arts Council.
Robbins has exhibited internationally, with work shown at institutions including the Butler Institute of American Art, the Château Museum (Rochefort-en-Terre, France), the Springfield Museum of Art (OH), Sears/Peyton Gallery (NY), Bonfoey Gallery (Cleveland), Lydon Fine Arts (Chicago), the Carnegie Center for the Visual Arts (KY), Morehead State University (KY), Florida State University, Cleveland State University, the Maryland Institute College of Art, First Street Gallery (NYC), and The Painting Center (NYC). His paintings are included in the collections of the Nord Family Foundation, the Columbus Metropolitan.