The works in Charlie Roberts’ Freedom Forever exhibition show the artist’s great ability to perfectly capture the essence of a figure with a fluidity that seems effortless.

Upon entering the Richard Heller Gallery, the viewer sees a row of several 4 x 6 inch watercolor paintings that span much of the main wall. Each sheet of paper contains several images, most often figures, arranged in a grid, the edges of the paper slightly ripped as if pulled from the page of a book.

There is a delicacy juxtaposed with the grotesque and the raw in Roberts’ brushstrokes. The play in his strokes mimic the play in his imagery. Cleverly indexing generic, seemingly random categories of images - Roberts creates works that are succinct, built with a careful selection of staccato marks.

The exhibition is made up of several visual indexes – watercolor on paper paintings of categories ranging from Villains to Food, Potential Weapons to Baseball. His impulse to categorize makes the viewer question whether the artist is presenting these images with a preconceived analysis, or as a mode of questioning the nature of the connections made through this categorization process. These spontaneous sequences of images create histories and definitions.

On the opposing wall from the small pages hang paintings of open books with pages filled with these similar compulsive sequences of imagery. One painting titled Sunday Morning Anthropology portrays a condensed version of images one might find in an anthropology book. Roberts’ paintings become a condensed version of the images and categories we process in our everyday.

-Anna Ayeroff

(Images from top to bottom:  Charlie Roberts, Heroes and Villains, 2008, Gouache on paper, 6 X 4 inches, Courtesy Richard Heller Gallery; Charlie Roberts, Cartoons, 2008, Gouache on paper, 6 X 4 inches, Courtesy Richard Heller Gallery; Charlie Roberts, Books, 2008, Gouache on paper, 6 X 4 inches, Courtesy Richard Heller Gallery)