John Hurrell – 6 December, 2025

Five large, complex but entertaining cartoons of elongated overlapping ghosts, birds, barefooted dorky figures, cudgels, splayed fingers, manacled limbs, bulbous toes and webbed feet are here presented by Peter Robinson, rendered in charcoal, wash and oilstick. Speedily drawn compositions that are gorgeously gross, levitate clusters of hovering fragmented body-parts so that scribbled pen marks, speech bubbles, L-brackets, half-formed letters and jostling coloured smudges compete to suggest a crammed stack of images—coincidentally bearing spontaneously formed meaning.

Frenetic unstable energy from a hyper-jittery twitching hand dominates. The word FUN is repeatedly stated as a driving motivation in the marks’ manufacture, causing the mood within the Pollocklike field to become calculatedly chaotic, piecemeal, infantile and (if it antagonises) downright giggly. Yet more than baiting is going on in this thinly spread poisonous concoction.

This highly emotional (but knowingly vacuous) show of energetic uglified drawings is geared to more than provoke. Clever in its jumbled art historical references and outrageously naughty in its calculatedly stupid oafishness, it is also overtly daffy in its tedious reflexivity. Yet as is screamingly obvious, it is hoots-galore but with a surplus!

The apparent fun exuded by these overloaded, consciously silly doodles would delight a jocular Jack-the-Ripper. With that vertiginous viewer pleasure comes a sword in the guts, a poisoned chalice, an optical toxicity. The alluring bait that an apparently hilarious jammed-up historical puzzle provides—from looking at an elegant but exploded Donald Duck—leads to a vicious trap that snaps the limbs of the approaching artlover so they become a mocked and damaged intruder. A strange game gradually occurs: they become an organ-slicer, penetrating all suckers who venture near.

So has Robinson become too cynical? Have I myself (as observer) become too cynical? Or possibly nihilistic?

And the Artist? Does Art in its nature really worry him? By going on about ‘fun’ ad nauseum, is it as if he isn’t really sure about Art’s values? Is that possible?

These big, exhilaratingly scaled, ‘nasty’, shambolic drawings are well worth investigating face-to-face. They are strangely troubling. You check them out at your peril.

John Hurrell

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