Canadian artist Robert Berlin’s After/Image explores vestiges of motion; obscure, fleeting nuances of ritual and ceremony - from Seville to Bali to Siem Reap, Berlin explores the synergy and abstraction found in captured movement, blurred color and shadowed form.
Neither mimetic nor completely abstract, his work occupies a space where motion is being, time is seen and the body itself gives way to only a hint, a glimpse , a trace, of itself….
signs of life, the life of objects before the objects themselves, the essence of bodies apart from themselves, through the deconstruction of colour and movement.
“Rudolf Arnheim once wrote: ‘whereas the painter invents, the photographer discovers...’
Berlin’s work seeks to transcend traditional definitions.
“I paint through my photography and I photograph from a painter’s viewpoint so that hopefully the result is neither painting nor photography but something else, ambiguously perched between the two mediums,”- R.B.