robert tombs studio

“The historic industrial setting of the Mississippi Valley Textile Museum in Almonte underscores the importance of Robert Tombs’s work in Factory. On Canvas (2024), a large oak display case stuffed with cotton, bales of cotton, pulls our thoughts further. Cotton grown in plantation rows, cotton picked by workers, then and now, having little choice in the matter. Who are they? Look to Signature (2024). The artist covered one of the factory’s pillars with black handprints. No more is said of the matter. In Autobiography (2023), a 10-minute video, we do not see the artist nor his hand. We are looking at a graceful, hypnagogic swirl of dark and white, circling, flowering, returning, greying into nothingness. The end. Awaken. Does it matter? Yes. Brigus Mark is a two-minute video. We see the artist’s hand splashing paint onto a rock in Newfoundland. Not just any rock. Through the camera’s viewfinder we can see the ocean beyond, as well as rocks nearby. The paint prompts a second look. The shifting points-of-view of trance states sometimes enable experiences scholars call ‘kratophany’, the phenomenon many cultures have termed ‘sacred’, and specific to time and place. From the beginnings of time, people have marked such places, an acknowledgement of those understandings. Does AI know that too? Is it time to punch in?”

> Maureen Korp, Review: “Questions of Place and Time,” Image, Spring issue, 2024

“When Radio Canada International first erected its short-wave towers on the unspoiled Tantramar Marshes of New Brunswick, tears must have been shed. Now, thanks to the brilliant and poetic documentation in Ghost Stations, we get to witness the life and death of those towers, and to recognize that the marshes — nature itself — will always outlast humanity’s aspirations and depredations. The result is at least a touch cheering, but also poignant.”

> Blake Gopnik, Contributing Critic to the New York Times and author of the comprehensive biography Warhol (Ecco at HarperCollins, 2020)

“The juxtaposition with Soviet-era photography and cinema is striking, but the design also supports that history. It is beautiful!”

> Dr. Annie Guerin, Dean, Faculty of Fine Arts, Concordia University and author of Devastation and Laughter: Satire, Power and Culture in the Early Soviet State, 1920s–1930s (University of Toronto Press, 2018)

“This is a ‘total work of art’ in its own right – where art, words, design, and printing have come together as a beautiful, unified whole.”

> Victoria Angel, heritage planner and principal, ERA Architects Inc.

“The context of Tombs’s installation is as important as its content — or rather, it is through its context that content is smuggled into the space it occupies. The title of the work carries most of the weight. L’Occupation signifies on one level the activity of the artist himself. This is his job. He is making a painting installation about painting. He is also occupying the space with his work for the duration of the exhibition, and in this regard, the work occupies as much of the space as possible by covering all of the available walls.

On another level, Tombs is explicitly positioning his work within a history of ‘occupations’ of Paris. In his artist statement for the show, Tombs claims that the work can be considered to allude to the Occupy Paris movement, to the occupation of France by the Nazis during World War II, to the reigns of autocratic kings that led to the French Revolution, and even to the reign of French Academic painting. If the stripped-down aesthetic of the installation allows for multiple, suggestive readings, it is largely due to the geographical location of the gallery, and the long history of Parisian seizures and conflicts in which the installation takes part. But additionally, there is a kind of delusional grandeur to the work, not only in the act of claiming such historical significance, but also in the use of basic store-bought materials to adorn the gallery with gold.”

> Michael Davidge, Review: L’Occupation, ParisCONCRET, Paris, France, C Magazine, Issue 118, 2013