About
Robert Scholten is an artist based in Melbourne, Australia, and works in the mediums of painting and drawing.
Robert Scholten's art encompasses a world of realism tinged with the fantastic; a desire to integrate the extremes of human experience: the sublime and the profane, the reality and the immaterial, the inner and the outer. Inspired by sources such as ukiyo-e, typography, printed ephemera and everyday life, Robert plays with the fragments of existence, sewn together by the experience of the individual.
Artist Statement: Traces of Being
An exploration of being: the human passage through time and space is a journey we call life. To be, to experience, to live, to love, all imply action, existence opposed to non-existence, being as opposed to nothingness. The complexity of this journey is what I wish to examine through my paintings and drawings, using the remains of these actions.
Within the experience of being, time creates a succession of change; new moments begin, and old moments die. A myriad of sensations – feelings, memories, desires, imaginations, perceptions – are generated and act as traces of these moments, ghosts of what is and what isn’t there.
By creating marks on a flat surface (through the processes of painting and drawing), I create images where every pictorial gesture generates readings that are representations of my sensations, as well as the materiality or “facture” of the work. Essentially, as I create work, each part of the picture becomes a trace, physically and metaphysically, of my existence.
The structure of the layered imagery in my work has been informed by the collagic practice of David Salle, Julian Schnabel, Robert Rauschenburg and Francis Picabia. The stream of consciousness evident in the novels of James Joyce and writings on Deconstruction of Jacques Derrida inform my understanding of complexity. Their multi-layered ideas of complexity of being where observations of the contemporary everyday outer world meets the inner world of feelings. Ideas of existence and being have been informed largely by existentialist and Eastern philosophies, such as Jean-Paul Satre, Martin Heidegger and Zen Buddhism.