About

Artist Statement

To dream, to feel, to connect with the vibrational energies of life.

There is a deeper thread that connects us all. My work considers our connection to the larger web of life, suggesting the permeability whereby all aspects of life touch and interconnect with each other. It does not take as it center the human experience, but rather considers life as a whole.

I am inspired by the philosophy of Spinoza, who sees everything as expressions of nature. This shifts our thinking from Platonic dualism to a sense of unity, as we are aspects of the same substance. As I feel my relationship to the world around me, I see our commonality, and begin to take better care of those around me, regardless of differences. It also pushes me to care more for the environment, showing me how my actions echo throughout this living tapestry. There is a pleasure in this relationship, as the small things occurring around me take on a greater meaning.

This sense of connection is reflected in the materials I use, and how I use them. Organic shapes play in a romantic dialogue fraught with harmony and tension. Lines act as planes, and everything relates in a non-hierarchical composition. Edges are perforated and multilayered, shapes and the areas between them all take part in an active dialogue. Layers are created in multiple ways, instilling a sense of movement through space. I both add and remove during the process of working and unworking a painting.

My work grows through motifs that build on and permeate one another. Small movements combine to create complex spaces. These complexities grow from the smaller interactions, just as the smallest elements of life combine to create a complex emergent body. In life, emergent properties show the complex relationships between organisms and their environment. In my paintings, the small movements grow one from each other. I learn about them and what they want, just as I learn about life, step by step, sometimes forwards, sometimes back. No one movement can be perfectly planned. Many of the most fascinating impressions are left over from what were considered mistakes of previous layers.

I do not aim for one reducible meaning that is meant to be the same for all. Rather, I create environments from which differing states will emerge for each viewer in a given time. I use the visual paradigm as a method for connecting the viewer and the work in a resonant conversation. It is drawing, painting, writing; it is reeling and unreeling the threads connecting us all. Space and rhythm dance as line and plane combine in permeable devices, pushing and pulling space back and forth in time. Layers develop from an interplay of materials, creating an emergent chaosmos, as color moves us and shifts in the resonant space that it creates. The interweaving complex of presences breathe through these movements and in turn seek to connect and vibrate with us.

Biography

Robert Najlis is an artist, working predominantly in painting, but also with interactive sound art and installation.

He is a Fulbright scholar, with a masters of fine arts from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and a masters in computer science with a focus on artificial intelligence and cognitive science from Indiana university. He also studied at the Art Students League of New York in the lineage of Hans Hofmann and George Bridgman.

Robert was born in Brooklyn, NY, and has also spent significant time in Latin America and Asia. In addition to his native English, he also speaks Spanish and Chinese.

In his work, Robert brings together both traditional skills and new concepts, researching ideas from thousands of years ago to work together with current day quantum mechanics and artificial intelligence.

Fundamental to all of his ideas is a focus on listening; feeling with sensitivity the resonances around us.