Interviewing Jeff Robb: The Lenticular Lensman Captures the Invisible
Jeff Robb is widely regarded as the foremost lenticular artist in the world: a London based artist, Royal College of Art trained with a degree in science and a taste for fine wine. Robb continues to explore the medium like no other artist has done in history: A unique vision combined with technical perfection result in the most beautiful and seductive work being made today. Robb is an award winning critically acclaimed of the highest calibre producing a profoundly positive 21st-century vision.
Amazing beauty, stripped or sheathed, crated and set free to float through all of eternity’s caged gleam (Unnatural Causes), shards of raw vivid, hung from the ceiling like some sci-fi slaughterhouse of the mind (Acts of Will), the human form, rid of adornment, arched into some convex construct from a Future world (Affinity), Jeff Robb ceaselessly explores the human form in otherworldly settings: These are just some of the impressions that come into play upon encountering the wily and wondrous work of British artist Jeff Robb. The result is a cascade of visions, expertly calculated to elicit the optimum wow.
The images are otherworldly – they look at first to be conventional, but the figures defy gravity, and occupy impossible spaces. Jeff Robb “captures the invisible” - With new ways of seeing, this is an adventure in art – discovering new worlds in three dimensions like never before.
“I capture these Liminal States in three dimensions – beauty between worlds using my own methods”
Robb's new Nightfall series is clearly a successor to his Freefall series. Both assert the life-affirming power of movement in graceful, gravity-defying poses, but in the new series drapery and colour seem to play a more important part. Perhaps we are looking at angels. After all, the figures are luminous, serene and unearthly, apparently without sin or grief. And they cast the merest shadow on the background - as if they are not really rooted to this world. Certainly Robb's dramatic use of drapery seems to borrow from the Classical depiction of the maenads. Robb creates pools of movement in which the figures seem to swim. We are mesmerised by this movement, as we are by swirling water. And like the figures themselves, we are absorbed, temporarily removed from the rest of the world. Robb uses acts of levitation, the sweep and flow of the drapery, and the invigorating power of the human body to instil a sense of liberation and freedom
Collaboration with Chris Levine - Jeff Robb has collaborated with light artists Chris Levine for over 20 years, including a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace, 80’s icon
Grace Jones, super model Kate Moss, Frankel and His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama and many others. He continues to work with Levine on a regular basis.
Collections
Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK
Getty Museum, Los Angeles, US
HRH Princess Firyal of Jordan
To view interview on Jeff Robb in Arte Fuse by John Hood, click here
