Paintings by Robert Joyette

Robert A. ‘Brooks’ Joyette was born in Kingstown, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, the son of Rhonda I. Sutherland Maloney and Horton C. Joyette. He attended the Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing arts in Kingston, Jamaica. IN HIS OWN WORDS Joyette is an artist who mainly works with painting/ mixed media. By applying abstraction, he presents every day objects as well as references to texts, painting and architecture. Pompous writings and utopian constructivists’ designs are juxtaposed with trivial objects. Categories are subtly reversed. Joyette creates situations in which everyday objects are altered or detached from their natural function. By applying specific combinations and certain manipulations, different functions and/or contexts are created. By rejecting an objective truth and global cultural narratives, he creates, with daily, recognizable elements, an unprecedented situation in which the viewer is confronted with the conditioning of his own perception and has to reconsider his biased position. His works do not reference recognizable form. The results are deconstructed to the extent that meaning is shifted and possible interpretation

becomes multifaceted. By demonstrating the omnipresent lingering of a “corporate world”, he creates intense personal moments by means of rules and omissions, acceptance and refusal, luring the viewer ‘round and ‘round in circles. His work urges us to renegotiate painting as being part of a reactive medium, commenting on oppressing themes in our contemporary society. With the use of appropriated materials which are borrowed from a day to day context, his works references post-colonial theory as well as the avant-garde or the post-modern and the left- wing democratic movement as a form of resistance against the logic of the capitalist market system. His works demonstrate how life life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the twentieth century. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between out own 'cannibal' and 'civilized' selves. Robert Joyette currently lives and works in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.