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Accepting the totality of humanity's spectacle of enlightenment and imbecility, Luke Roberts presents himself as an obsessed chronologist, encyclopaedist and museum curator of erratic human aspiration and its hysterical near-misses. Thus, his iconography veers between cosmic sublimity and Luna Park, secured to the constant bulwark of the Papacy. It diverts via American Indian, Egyptian and Japanese cultures in order to spin out an immaculately logical thread of personal and social interweavings by means of sound assonance and cross-played metaphor. His conceptualization displays the many natures of his persona, establishing them as valid and actual, rather than as play-acting masks and simulacra. In trying to free himself from the oppressive dualisms constructing norms of behaviour, Roberts aims to create an open space in his work; a space which is inclusive, non-judgmental but not lacking in discrimination. For this reason his work, like Salvo's and Dokoupil's, takes on a misleadingly eclectic appearance. At heart, it is celebratory of the populist.
By 1988 Roberts was moving away from an earlier density of texture in favour of a more reduced form1. In installations and performances2 materials were allowed to speak for themselves and the conceptual basis of his work, which had always been present, became clearer. Elements from arte povera gained greater significance: barbed wired, the surfaces of ruined walls, decay and fire processes.3
In fact, Roberts has always been more interested in the content of hardware and opportunity shops than in traditional artists' materials. His work may be seen as an objectification of Idea, rather than an interest in constructing surface for its own sake. He retrieves the halfformed and unresolved threads of early seventies conceptualism. Like Magritte, Roberts hovers around the edges... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline