Will Roberts (born 1977) is a contemporary British painter. He lives and works in the UK.
Will Roberts’ paintings are highly narrative, layering references to historical methodology of painting and contemporary culture. Roberts is interested in craftsmanship, the amateur, memory and the expression of our personalities through the display of domestic art objects that we have in our homes. Making the real artificial and the artificial real, Roberts reimagines these wall hung treasures as theatre props to objectify and to portray nostalgic value.
Rendering his paintings without using any direct source material, the paintings are not copies. Roberts calls them ‘False Objects’. The paintings occupy a parallel space, replicas of an original that has never existed. They act as vessels to hold the varying ways that he manipulates paint and its form. The materiality of the painting’s textured surface draws the viewer into the pursuit of craftsmanship, and the demands on time and attention and why that matters.
Roberts talks of a knowingness of an endless series of paintings that has provided him with a foreseeable longevity to his practice. A retelling of the stories of objects, objects we all might own. Depicting that object through paint also allows the paint/painting to depict its own form and thus its own history.
Slowing down the instantaneous application of paint to an almost sculpted aesthetic, Roberts explores our desires to own, make, collect or inherit wall-based objects and how their materiality gives these objects their intrinsic value. The desire to look but don’t touch is evident in the gallery context running adjacent or at odds against the domestic references of the objects. Roberts resituates the viewer’s gaze as voyeuristic and self-conscious yet also inviting us to reevaluate the seemingly undervalued.
