Robert Proch: Scroll Era

Scroll Era talks about our ultra modern society ruled by technology, information and communication. In this exhibition, Robert Proch gives a more prominent place to men in order to question our existence and the status of social bond today. On canvas, his characters are placed next to each other without exchanging a look or a word, and without -rarely- entertaining any relationships with one another. Here, what Robert Proch decries is our scrolling era ("scrolling" referring to the flow of information and images we absorb thanks to tactile screens) that fosters individualistic and self-centered lifestyle. We evolve in our own bubbles from within which we virtually communicate with others, whether we know them or not in real life, but mostly people with whom we are not face-to-face. As a consequence, public space, cities and architecture are profoundly altered. In this new body of works, Robert Proch develops his personal point of view on the matter.
Internationally recognized for about five years, the work of this young Polish artist has been praised for his sense of space. Multiplying viewpoints, vanishing lines and perspectives, he immerses the viewer in pictorial matter and unknown dimensions. Combining abstraction and figuration, two seemingly incompatible approaches, Robert Proch writes stories that unfold through spatial depth, inviting the viewer to travel, body and mind, through the artist's colors and glazes. In this new body of works, the architectural space is particularly fragmented: here Robert Proch returns to his first graffuturist love and focuses on geometrized shapes and verticality. Visitors might recognize computer circuit boards or the imagery of the Tron movie … A neither bicolor nor black and white verticality, but an explosion of colors instead. For the exhibition Scroll Era, the artist has used a very wide range of colors, building up a surprising balance between warm and cold hues and introducing new fluorescent tones. Robert Proch seems to reconcile color and line in an academic approach of painting all the while proposing a humanist and social vision of the world.
Although faced with the expansion of technology in our daily and professional lives, and up until the international contemporary art scene, Robert Proch seems to praise technical mastery through a more and more elaborated painting work on canvas. After Turn the Corner (2013) and 545 Days (2015), Scroll Era is his third show at Galerie Chenus Longhi, and the first for which he experiments wood as a new medium. Robert Proch has indeed transcribed his pictorial universe in three-dimension through a traditional high-relief sculptural work, for which he manually cut and assembled painted wood. The exhibition features a total of 27 artworks (paintings on canvas, wood sculptures and watercolors on paper) and mark a new step in the career of this already renowned young international artist.