Rob Bartolo
Most Regular People Will Say
November 23 – December 16, 2006

 
Back home in the suburbs of the west, the hoons in their hotted up cars, industrial wastelands, and playgrounds are scenes that are all too familiar to artist Rob Bartolo.  

 
Bartolo has painted ever so delicately night suburbia with yellowish and pinkish lights that illuminate the streets. The sunsets and dawn settings that give the artist ‘tingling sensations’ are spooky exciting images that are familiar to all of us.  All these notions give us something that we belong to, something comfortable or not so comfortable.  

While the daylight hours provide a stage for the mundane activities of day-to-day life, the twilight landscape pulls back the curtains on a whole new setting, creating mystery and romantic ideals.  Investigating the artificial light which subtlety fills the streets of the west, these paintings have a sense of reminiscing, a sort of dreamy reverie.  

“My aim is for the viewer to be able to feel the moods running through these paintings.  This is accomplished with glazes and layering of colours giving these pictures an individual rhythmic quality.
      
Essentially the works evolve in an organic fashion, using these paintings as stepping-stones to gain a greater understanding of the world I live in, both past and present.  The work is not definitive statements of the world we live in, but multi-layered visual memoirs, as I have experienced it.”   (Rob Bartolo, 2006)

 
If you are fan of Stanley Spencer, Jeffrey Smart or Edward Hopper then you are in for treat.