About

Artizan Gallery welcomes South West Academician, Robert Mountjoy to show a body of work completed following a trip he made to Spain in 2019, as they enter their Summer season of exhibitions.

In September 2019, Robert Mountjoy took an unscheduled trip to Spain, visiting Andalucía and its historic sites. He took a sketchbook and a camera and came back full of new ideas, minimalist forms and textures, but most of all colours— reds – both intense and bleached out, with deep yellows and dusty grey/blues.

He spent some weeks playing with figurative landscapes based on the drawings, but felt he was not producing anything new or exciting. Looking back through his photographs, he found a batch where he had accidentally nudged camera settings to wide angle and continued to shoot before noticing the mistake. The resulting images showed views through narrow streets from one plaza to another with 'barrel' distortion… and these resonated with a series of abstract collage sketches he had been experimenting with.

The artist adapted and scaled up some of his collages; overlapping convex sided lozenges and painting them with the hot dry colours and textures recalled from the recent travels. Working on HDF or canvas boards, he built up layers of colour and texture over hard edged forms with contrasting gaps. The colours became more intense as the series continued and the stripped-down forms less architectural.

Having had individual works exhibited in several showcases over the past two years, the full collection now comes to Artizan Gallery in this new exhibition.