THE Magazine - Los Angeles

Chad Robertson's paintings are stunning -- almost literally. Robertson engineers dozens of separate realities and scenarios into seemingly infinite picture planes inhabiting singular canvases, setting in motion an operatic swell of information that threatens to induce agnosia. Several years ago the artist began developing a unique approach to portraiture that involved two or perhaps three translucent layers, creating composite images with paradoxical emotional signals, optical complexity, and the illusion of movement. He favored ghostly, empty backgrounds and confined, though nuanced, palettes. Since then, Robertson has exploded his divine instrumentarium: where there was one, there are now multitudes. Where there were single notes and simple (though moving) chords, there is now a vast orchestral dissonance. What is remarkable is the cheeky bravado with which Robertson wrangles his many narrative and formal directionalities into a cognitive coherence that not only holds together but gradually reveals engaging, if surreal, narrative. Music is indeed the intended metaphor for viewing the work, which Robertson calls "Mash-Ups" after the popular musical genre of blending disparate songs together according to subtle common elements. Mash-Up #17 depicts a large central figure peering through a plate-glass window, her slight darkening of the glass revealing not only the ethereal details of her face but allowing the viewer a higher-contrast view of the action beyond her, outside in the middle distance. Above, a swimmer floats half-submerged in a pool; below, an Arctic sea is plied by icebergs. Throughout are animals, city lights, bits of the world up in flames, figures in silhouette running and tumbling, each with its own economy of scale and light source. All of this, and more, is assembled like collaged, sketched freehand, and almost too well at that -- Robertson risks losing sight of the poetic whole for love of the technique. The overall effect suggests a storyboard for string theory, or a cross-section of the place in the brain where memories are stored. It's like life in modern times -- overwhelmingly simultaneous, hybridized, paradoxical, comprehensive, mysterious, and often very beautiful.