'Colour is both suggestive and personal. It can be objectively suggestive in some ways, in that it can lead to notions of landscape and other things, or it can be quite manufactured and industrial. I try to work against my own sense of colour, or against the last group of colours I used. Often the colour is informed by the watercolour drawings, but obviously the translation from watercolour to oil paint is very different. You could say that I’m simply trying to surprise myself with colour.'
R. Holyhead in conversation with D. Trigg, ‘Robert Holyhead – interview: ‘I see each painting as a single, emerged gesture’, Studio International, 18 December 2019
‘[...] He sees his practice as grappling with how to actively paint in the present moment rather than making pre-conceived “descriptions” or “critiques” of abstract paintings. Even though they are planned and precise, the necessity to execute the works quickly while the oil paint is still fluid - and can be removed and manipulated - is a way of trying to open up a space and time where decisions must be resolved in the moment and the process of painting – whether gestural or geometric – can have an active presence and retain a provisionality in the experience of encountering the works.’
F. Parry, ‘New Dialogues: the paintings of Robert Holyhead’, 2012
‘[...] Some of the forms in Holyhead’s work appear to have a geometric parentage. Traditionally geometry has represented ideal form or has suggested a pure sign value used akin to some linguistic ground. And yet, the distant resonances of geometric elements in these paintings are treated “in process” rather than idealised objects. They are morphed, becoming edges, fragments, or are doubled, echoed, and twisted.’
D. Ryan, ‘The Beginning Answer’, 2008
‘[...] In the, sometimes, long periods between making paintings Holyhead produces multiple watercolours on paper at a standard small-sized format. The drawings are a means of testing out spatial relationships between colour, viscosity, form, edge and scale. They create a continuum as well as a memory bank where existing dialogues and sensibilities can be retained and new ones can emerge. Holyhead handles the drawings like cards to be constantly rearranged and reconsidered, as if from a very personal vocabulary short phrases have been allowed to settle but not become fixed.’
F. Parry, ‘New Dialogues: the paintings of Robert Holyhead’, 2012
‘[...] I want a type of gesture or touch in the paintings [...] I’m trying to bring in this thing called painting rather than this thing called abstraction. That’s really important for me. I need to see the work as an inquiry into painting.’
R. Holyhead, in Robert Holyhead: Paintings, exh. cat., Karsten Schubert, London; London: Ridinghouse, 2010, p. 13
‘Untitled (Eye) [...] displays an array of marks and directional pulls, and its colour is a sumptuous turquoise-like blue-green. It has a tripartite division: an elongated horizon with two divisions below. Each of these sectioned areas houses a small white block that has been wiped from the surrounding colour. These act as three focal points that rebound across the surface. The divisions themselves create a fan-like figure centrally but this is an illusion of sorts, since it is where the zones or demarcations have been wiped off against each other or cancel each other out. This tension through negation or erasure continually makes for a surprising malleability of density, opacity and light. And in this piece, the configurations of marks appear to conjure an array of partial ghost figures, forms and edges.’
D. Ryan, ‘Robert Holyhead - Paintings’, in Robert Holyhead, exh. cat., Berlin/London: Galerie Max Hetzler, Holzwarth Publications and Ridinghouse, 2014, p. 20
‘[...] are Holyhead’s paintings geometric or gestural? Such a question leads us to the kind of neutrality that is favoured by the artist himself. Not only does he avoid such easy categorisations, but within the individual paintings, contrasting elements are held in equilibrium and sustain each other. If we can see the “sharper“ hard-edged elements as, as times, approximating the geometric - rectangles, triangles, circles etc. - they tend to lose any sense of symbolic or essentialist overtones through Holyhead’s setting them to work pictorially. They act as pins, wedges, slots, slits, focal points. It is an active geometry that is found within these individual paintings, with each elements activated for the total formation of the work. This functional and pragmatic sense of form is characteristic and also a reminder of the realistic turn in Holyhead’s language. This neutrality emphasises the smooth interconnection between parts in the paintings and a moment of closure for the process of painting.’
D. Ryan, ‘Robert Holyhead - Paintings’, in Robert Holyhead, exh. cat., Berlin/London: Galerie Max Hetzler, Holzwarth Publications and Ridinghouse, 2014, pp. 16-17
‘[...] the paintings are specifically contained in groups or sets; unlike the implied “infinite” production of form in the works on paper, the limits of a set in terms of form, scale and colour are staked out as they progress, but consciously regulated [...] This relationship of the individual painting to the collective experience of the group is important to Holyhead’s project. It is also bound with his approach to abstraction, where endless productivity or variation is made concrete and specific to the circumstances of a particular piece.’
D. Ryan, ‘Robert Holyhead - Paintings’, in Robert Holyhead, exh. cat., Berlin/London: Galerie Max Hetzler, Holzwarth Publications and Ridinghouse, 2014, p. 16
‘[...] Untitled (Shapes) consists of a freely brushed, intensely pervasive inky blue containing an assembly of eleven uneven rectangles. These forms have been arrived through wiping back to the white ground - usually in these works this erasure is done with either a brush, rag or even finger, free-hand without tapes. The rectangles appear to float, obstinate in coming forward although essentially “holes” in the painted surface. Yet this ground is marked by the absented pigment - crucially, always retaining its trace. As in most of Holyhead’s work, we sense a double motion of painting: at once an attention to the “timbre” of the colour - rather like adjusting the pitch of a sound - and the different twists and turns of the mark and the hand present in the physical medium. In Untitled (Shapes), this latter articulation creates a central vertical spine of darker blue that runs irregularly down the painting; it gives a central anchorage while the painting as a whole retains lightness and the diverse articulation of form between elements. It is as though Holyhead, who often speaks of poise or a delicate balancing act, has articulated both stasis and motion simultaneously.’
D. Ryan, ‘Robert Holyhead - Paintings’, in Robert Holyhead, exh. cat., Berlin/London: Galerie Max Hetzler, Holzwarth Publications and Ridinghouse, 2014, p. 17
‘[...] Untitled (Vent) appears to encapsulate the contradictions held by Holyhead’s urge towards unity. In this sense the colour and the form, the surface, the marks, the addition and the erasure, must work together as a sustained contradiction. The colour, its light green, is ghostly, transient. The larger form is rock-like and organic, substantial; the marks weave their ways around this form, somehow feeling it as a mass. The thin rectangular bar - erased from the surface - is like a call to order: a reminder of abstract measure. It holds not just the shape but also the painting itself in a quiet yet palpable tension between flatness and modulated space.’
D. Ryan, ‘Robert Holyhead - Paintings’, in Robert Holyhead, exh. cat., Berlin/London: Galerie Max Hetzler, Holzwarth Publications and Ridinghouse, 2014, p. 20
‘The drawings allow me to pursue certain things such as how paint with a precise viscosity might move on a surface or how form can be isolated in a washed colour without bleeding away. Sometimes I ask the paper to allow for a series of relatively conventional forms to hover in space. Other times I just want the edges to perform a specific role. Each time I approach a watercolour drawing I’m asking it to behave in many ways. I may ask a drawing to advance on previous thoughts about how the physicality of paint can line the surface or how particular forms can exist in tension within the space. The questions I ask of the watercolours are both continual and again accumulative. They allow me to move through ideas very quickly.’
R. Holyhead, in Robert Holyhead: Paintings, exh. cat., Karsten Schubert, London; London: Ridinghouse, 2010, p. 12
‘Although the term abstraction is the one most immediately and perhaps easily associated with Holyhead’s work, for him it has its limitations, or even inadequacies. The notion of the abstract, it could be argued, proposes an inherent disconnection from the outside world. But [...] Holyhead regards his paintings as being emphatic about their own materiality, and for him this precludes them from being narrowly defined as abstract. He acknowledges that, “...they’re not representational in any sense. They don’t rely on any sort of figurative imagery, yet at the same time there’s a problem for me if I try to make pure abstract paintings. I don’t even know what that is. The external world appears in a very complex and unrecognised way ... painting is a mediator, really, between me and a very abstract sensibility.”’
I. Swenson, ‘Paintings and works on paper’, in Robert Holyhead, exh. cat., London: Peer Gallery, 2012, p. 10
‘When paint is removed, the process is scrupulous and labour-intensive: in some works the colour is carefully lifted off the surface with a brush, in others it is dragged into an alternative shape, or precisely wiped away to leave a razor-sharp edge. Rather than reading as gestures of negation or erasure, these precise manoeuvres constitute a meticulous “editing” of the paint on canvas, a process that demands extreme concentration, accuracy and control. Crucially, as Holyhead points out, the painting must not become laboured or overworked, but should stop at the point when it achieves a fragile sense of cohesion. Translucent brushstrokes that initially appear free-floating and ephemeral are anchored and pulled taut by the exactitude of their placement, so that instead of hovering over the ground, they appear on closer inspection to be imbedded within it. It is this tension between fluidity and fixity, lightness and deliberateness of touch, which captures the curiosity of the spectator and makes the paintings so compelling.’
A. Lovatt, ‘A Space of Encounter: On the Paintings of Robert Holyhead’, in Robert Holyhead, exh. cat., Karsten Schubert, London; London: Ridinghouse, 2009, p. 4
‘On encountering Robert Holyhead’s paintings the experience is one of being in the presence of lucidity; of a precision that is both disarming and difficult to locate. Yes, there is clarity to his ovoid forms, wonky grids or angular strips of colour, but the preciseness seems elsewhere. These particular forms might operate rather like a common triadic chord would for a neoclassical composer: As something both familiar and foreign, no longer of “structural” necessity, more a found object conjuring up the complexities of memory and expectation (as happened in Stravinsky, for example, in the 1920’s). Such a comparison might appear strange, but the painter today who chooses to explore the languages of abstraction has to do so on different terms than the inherited ones, while still wrestling with some of the ghosts of the past.
[...] Yet the burden of these inherited traditions of abstraction are made light through the very weightlessness of touch, and the game or puzzle-like qualities that permeate these paintings. This sense of play is important, as is the peculiar interface, as the artist himself suggests, between ‘what the hand wants and what the painting demands.’ In identifying a constellation of play, objectivity, and sensibility, it is possible to move closer to this sense of precision and lucidity in Holyhead’s work and its un-locatable quality.’
D. Ryan, ‘Contigent Moves’, 2005
‘[...] British artist Robert Holyhead has attracted increasing acclaim for his delicately exerted and intimate abstract paintings. His highly developed vocabulary of colour, shape and line is articulated through a personal visual language of positive and negative space created by the application and removal of paint.’
I. Swenson, ‘Paintings and works on paper’, in Robert Holyhead, exh. cat., London: Peer Gallery, 2012, p. 1
‘Since moving to his current studio in 2005, Holyhead’s paintings have become lighter in touch and sparer in composition [...] While earlier canvases were entirely covered in serpentine lines or geometric forms in bold, sometimes clashing colours, the recent paintings are more restrained compositionally and chromatically. There is a sense that something is being withheld [...] Instead of having a distancing effect however, this reticence in the painting prompts an attitude of curious inquiry in the beholder, visiting an intimate mode of looking that can be described in terms of the ‘encounter’. Most obviously, Holyhead’s paintings invite close engagement due to their modest size, or rather, their scale in relation to the human body. Portrait-oriented and limb-length, they establish a corporeal relationship with the viewer that brings with it a sense of familiarity. Yet this intimacy is unsettled by a certain structural or chromatic awkwardness that pervades the paintings, making them difficult to place. Asymmetrical and decanted yet neither impulsive nor random, Holyhead’s formal arrangements have a kind of unfathomable precision, indicating a decision-making process that remains inaccessible to the spectator.’
A. Lovatt, ‘A Space of Encounter: On the Paintings of Robert Holyhead’, in Robert Holyhead, exh. cat., Karsten Schubert, London; London: Ridinghouse, 2009, pp. 2-3
All works: © Robert Holyhead
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