Robert Gaudreau

Nationality: USA
Date of Birth: Sept. 23, 1957

About the Artist - Robert Gaudreau


“Robert Gaudreau Celebrates the Dreams, Nightmares, and Vanity of Homely Humanity”

What seems to set the figurative painter Robert Gaudreau apart from a lot of other artists today is that he is not going through all sorts of clever conceptual or stylish contortions to overcome what one critic recently had the audacity to refer to as “the fallen state of painting since the 1960's, when Andy Warhol merged it with mechanical reproduction and Minimalism petrified it with a basilisk stare.”

If, in fact, painting actually has fallen nobody seems to have told Gaudreau about it: for he still proceeds as if painting still matters, and in doing so, makes it matter in the way that it always has when it is any good: as a way of looking at the world and humanity quite apart from the declarations of critics and the currents of fashion.

It is necessary to make clear that Gaudreau, a former professional sign painter, has developed a highly sophisticated personal iconography which combines elements of Expressionism and Surrealism, and that he is without question one of our more prolific observers of the human condition.

It is the many bizarre situations and psychological states that his paintings portray that tempts one to regard Gaudreau as a contemporary peer of artists such as Ensor and Munch, who link Expressionism to Symbolism, and with whom he shares a lineage that goes all the way back to Bosch and Bruegel.

But while one can discern a steady, subtle progression as the artist becomes more technically proficient in the handling of his mediums, the overall vision appears to have been present fully formed from the beginning.

Humanity is depicted in the raw: usually naked in both emotion and body: lumpy of physique flesh scored with swirling “elephant skin” lines recalling the figures Henry Moore sketched huddled in air raid shelters during W.W.II bombardments of London.

If the notion of beauty or elegance ever comes up it is normally seen merely as a facet of pretension, in a pose that one of Gaudreau’s figures strikes in a moment of grotesque, self-parodying vanity.

Yet their lack of comeliness does not stop these beings, most of whom, male or female, are as hairless as exterterrestials (in with their dome-like sculls, they often resemble) from coupling hungrily.

Such self-consciousness seems to be a constant in Gaudreau’s world, where the drawn or painted characters often seem to pose and preen for us, like the man flashing a big toothy grin with a grimacing child propped precariously on his shoulders i "Father and Son". It is a situation that many of us may recognize from leafing through an old family album and wondering, Was Dad really that proud or just blind drunk, as usual?"

Although he can conjure up complex multi-figure tableaux as hellish as anything ever imagined by Bosch, as indicated by such titles as “West Bank” and “Totalitarian,” that Robert Gaudreau is also an astute student of human behavior, as well as the pathos of conformist social conventions.

Ed McCormack, Managing Editor of Gallery and Studio Magazine.
(Former senior writer for Rolling Stone magazine, Interview magazine and others)
Nov-Dec 2009 - Jan 2010 issue