David Shrobe: People Are Centered
By Kekeli Sumah
People are centered in the painted and assembled works of New York born artist David Shrobe. The paintings deploy a variety of gestures — deliberate and intuitive — to produce beautifully enigmatic works that appear found. The surface is an illusion. At times, it is a layered film with grit, color and shape, while in other moments, it becomes a taut window into a subject whose name and identity is just out of reach. These paintings are of people, or more accurately, they are of characters composed from likenesses of friends, family, and at times, even the artist himself.
In thinking about the history of painting, one can see a history of surface manipulation through color, shape and line. For Shrobe, this engagement is across a multitude of disciplines, including: collage, sculpture, painting and drawing. The lessons of composition, surface manipulation, and tension gained through his experience with other disciplines are distilled into his paintings, which plumb questions of identity, hybridity, and Blackness, while situating portraiture as a mode of research and exploration.
Within the genre of portraiture in painting, the intent of the painter is often to represent a human subject in their full likeness. This act of representation is meant to go beyond mere outward appearance; it’s supposed to capture some kind of inner significance — their true identity — their true selves, their soul. In this light, portraiture becomes an act of remembrance — a record, even if fabricated or idealized. But do the subjects of Shrobe have a soul that can be represented or captured in a painting? They don’t — and not because they are wanting of life, rather they are brimming with the souls of multiple lives, narratives and histories. Shrobe’s figures are shrouded in enigmatic energy, operating on a symbolic plane.
The figures often appear fragmented; they are a combination of parts pulled from art history, familial figures, lyrical prose, and personal signification. They exist as hybrids, whose manifold identities are made manifest through dark and murky compositions set against sensuous and curvilinear fields of color. It is in this manner that Shrobe is able to work with abstraction in order to explore gesture and mark-making through form, color and assemblage. In these moments, the indices of play and spontaneity find their way into the work, appearing as a pull chain on Everything Flows Through Her, or a fallen and slumped pale head in Surveyors of Stars.
Yet, through it all, the figure remains steadfast, along with their gaze. Shrobe’s subjects are neither hostile nor overtly confrontational. Most of them avert their gaze (Surrender to the Air, Ascension, Drop Me Off in Harlem) either out of avoidance or perhaps captivated by a mystery lurking just past the viewer. Others, like Liberty on My Side, and Trickster Whom We Must Become, engage the viewer with full awareness of their own subjectivity, and a galaxy behind their eyes. This plays into Shrobe’s use of daguerreotypes as visual reference for the subjects in these paintings. Rather than nostalgia, Shrobe pulls from the mythic qualities daguerreotypes had in the early history of photography, when imaging eyes and faces gave a viewer access to portals into the soul. This raises a question that encircles the impetus behind the work: what lurks within the souls of Black folk?
Unsurprisingly, Shrobe complicates our response. Of mixed heritage across ethnic, racial and spiritual categories, Shrobe is deeply aware of the identities, histories and narratives that forge human experiences. Such depth comes to life through the cornucopia of materials that find their way into his studio practice. Sourcing pieces from his family home in Harlem, his neighborhood and the studio, Shrobe brings notions of identity, history and memory to the surface through collage, assemblage and bas relief. It’s not forced; it’s simply embedded in the work through the legacies of materials inherited from a bygone time.
Employed and arranged, the play between negative and positive space in the works, whether raised or illusory, activates the embedded material histories through various acts of distortion and transformation. Storytelling becomes alive, raising themes of presence, belonging and genealogy: who am I and where do I fit? Drop Me Off in Harlem, and Surrender to the Air echo these ideas with Afro-futurist and surrealist sensibilities.
Still the question remains: what lurks within the souls of Black folk? After studying the work of David Shrobe, it would seem that perhaps what lurks there—similar to what lurks in the souls of all folk—are the fragmented and assembled histories, narratives and memories of those who’ve walked before us, that is to say: people are centered in our souls.
