Robert Baker Paintings

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The Medium is the Message

In his book ‘The Medium is the Message’ (The Penguin Press, London 1967), Marshall MacLuhan makes the compelling argument that society has always been ‘shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication’.

In the 19th century Charles Baudelaire described the necessity for ‘a painter of modern life’. I intend my work to reflect the significant technological development of the ‘modern’ world. I’m not attempting to express a point of view or be judgemental about modern technologies. I’m trying to investigate parallels and experiment with the possibilities of what I know and what preoccupies me about painting with what I see and what fascinates me about television and computer screens. It is my intention that the paintings can be viewed as either utopian or dystopian and I am trying to avoid any conscious expressive personal viewpoint.

My paintings reflect a preoccupation with the human technological endeavour that now provides our imagery of the modern world. The paintings are an attempt to employ the underlying structure and possibilities of the television screen and the computer monitor—technologies that by employing infinite systematic permutations of tiny dots, squares, and lines can create an instantaneous narrative of imagery and configuration that Marshall MacLuhan identified as cool and dispassionate in their interpretation of what they see.

The paintings reflect and expose a random pattern of coincidences similar to those that underlie screen technology. For me the success of a painting is dependent on the relationship between the whole and the parts.

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The whole

The thing that moves us most deeply about a painting is its overall structure. This structure is beyond mere composition. It involves the construction of the whole surface, from back to front, and the relationship of the multi dimensional spatial layers. The whole is absorbed at a glance within the first few seconds of our relationship with the painting and provides an immediate emotional response that moves us powerfully.

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The Parts

It is the ‘parts’, the larger and smaller passages of paint, that engage us further and sustain and reinforce the immediate power of the ‘whole’. They broaden and enliven the whole by making explicit and becoming intrinsic to the whole. The parts provide an insight into the full range of permutations that are available within the proposition provided by the whole.

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The material

The use of oil paint makes it possible to discover at least some of the endless permutations that are required to construct the parts and the whole. By layering and merging wet into wet, isolating and obscuring to create a sense of space, scale, monumentality, speed and movement from the marks, lines, shapes and forms that are the building blocks of the paintings.

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Forming

It is imperative that the paintings have the sense that they ‘come together’ before your eyes. They must ‘gel’, form, and coalesce before your eyes in the immediate instance of glancing and looking. This ‘coalescence’ parallels the way in which television and computer screens are in continuous transition between what has happened, what is happening and what is about to happen; clear and static in the moment but in fact a dynamic screen of constant and countless tiny fidgety movements.