PREVIEW: Robin Kid-Searching For America

Robin Kid is an autodidact multidisciplinary artist. His works hijack a variety of social, political and traditional imagery of the past and present, with rebellious, religious, fantastical and in some ways offensive undertones. He pulls intuitively from the world of advertising, the Internet, the entertainment industry and his childhood memories, to produce ambitious, enigmatic and thought-provoking narratives, which question the polarized world of the 21st century.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gallery Daniel Templon Archive

We live in an era of mass culture and a society of ceaseless consumption, our identities are being formed and transformed by the content we watch, the headlines we scroll, the advertising we assimilate and the algorithms we are targeted and framed by. As the 21st century kicks off with a rocky start this narrative has only increased in intensity, distinctions now seem to be blurred, propaganda is blending with news, church with state, brands have melted with art and perhaps we can no longer distinguish one from the other. Robin Kid’s new show “Searching For America” is a wide-eyed, provocative – and sometimes even offensive – journey through a multitude of different “Americas”, from the one that comforts to the one that worries, from the one that creates to the one that destroys. Through his work the artist dives headlong into the maelstrom of American iconography as an export, the kind of imagery that programmed the morals, fears and expectations for generations worldwide. Paintings, sculptures and installations are filtered through a European sensibility and serve as a fascinating exploration of a culture that is both immediately familiar and thoroughly alien but which influence leaves no-one untouched. By conjuring up feelings of uncertainty but also of our most naive hopes and dreams gathered during our formative childhood and teenage years, Robin Kid illustrates how our collective consciousness through programmed memories can serve as an allegory for History at large, addressing larger social and political issues, whether directly or abstractly. This perspective highlights the fluid and sometimes fictional nature of our understanding of the past and our expectations for the future. Fascinated by the power of consumer spectacle, Robin Kid seizes upon the vocabulary of billboard advertising – with its thrills of big planes of color, giant slogans that invade your life and its overall promise that “the future can only be better” – as a way of expressing the disillusionment felt by today’s youth and addresses the hypocrisy which feels prevalent in the present landscape. By combining die-cut stainless steel panels with oil paintings and aluminum sculptures in a playful toylike manner, the artist is manufacturing an idealized billboard to our shared fears and desires while operating in a context of power and control. Influenced by the works of James Rosenquist and Robert Rauschenberg’s “combines” or Jim Dine’s early works like ‘lawnmower’ and  ‘child’s blue wall’, Robin Kid’s new pieces are hybrids, neither painting nor sculpture, but both at once. They invade the viewer’s space, demanding its attention and instigate a dialogue by becoming eye-popping and menacing yet perfectly balanced advertisements, invoking a nostalgia so strong it amounts to an ache, for they might show us a time and place of which we are and always have been exiled from.

Photo: Robin Kid, It Is New Venom (Searching For America – VI), 2024, Oil on canvas, stainless steel, aluminum, 300 × 497 × 40 cm — 118 × 195 3/4 × 15 3/4 in., © Robin Kid, Courtesy the artist and Gallery Daniel Templon

Info: Gallery Daniel Templon, 293 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 4/9-26/10/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.templon.com/