The universe is volatile, but it is in its nature to seek balance. In his studio, painter Robert Standish—whose practice encompasses both the mastery of photorealism and the surrender of expressive abstraction—embraces the pure fractal laws of nature, and also seeks to transcend them. His latter day work has pursued abstraction to explore instinct, emotion, rhythm, and an untamed palette; and Standish has become increasingly aware of the way his body and vision become attuned to the energies of not only the paint but its potential. As he works, a delicate conversation unfolds between what the heart has in mind and what the paint proposes. 

Standish’s enchantment with the metaphysical texture of the invisible world yields explosive ziggurats, prismatic passages of jewel-tone depths and impasto peaks, organic and glitchy ripples, interfered-with ethereal auras flecked with pure color, and poetic color stories that speak to the spectrum of emotion. Increasingly, the intuitive forces that guide his hand toward compositional, optical, and psychical balance from beyond this plane have manifested echoes from within it. As the landscape, the sea and sky, the forest and flower, the cave and peak, the river and valley have whispered to make their real world splendor known from within the painted field of imagination, their topographies are understood as both embodiments of nature’s laws and metaphors for our connection to something greater.

Contemplating the evocative crested furrows across the works’ surfaces, one wonders, is the pulsating blue the hue of the celestial canopy, or water and ice? Is a deep green that has soothed the eye an avatar of endless, feral forest? A fleshy pink continues to disrupt, to remind, to hold space for artifice. The mind searches for a horizon or sighs at a glancing ray of light, and is moved to think of storms and snow. Is it all really there, in the painting? The answer is yes, or if not entirely yes, then at least more yes than usual, as the exhibition’s title can be read as both permission to see images in the abstractions and as an acknowledgment of an ongoing state of exploration.

Feeling that he channels or receives rather than plans or controls, Standish joyfully recognizes that the paint itself is turning its attention toward the world around us—moving from the splendor of the whole universe to the majestic beauty of this time and place. In the way that JMW Turner sought an abstract pictorial language before the word existed, and in the way that Sam Francis courted chance, and early expressionists amplified pattern and texture, Standish is searching for a balance between what is seen and what is only sensed, what is believed and what is beheld, what is human and what is divine—or better still, a balance between all of it.

—Shana Nys Dambrot

Los Angeles, 2024