An exploration of Robert Roest’s exhibition at Europa Gallery, NYC

I visited Europa Gallery on New York’s Lower East Side to see Robert Roest’s exhibition, “Eight Paintings Proving Angels Are Really Watching Over Us.” I was intrigued, not only by the painted works themselves, but, by Roest’s ideas and concepts.

In an interview with Gideon Jacobs in Interview Magazine,¹ Roest discusses self-awareness and self-construction, and reality construction. In essence, the reality which we are contained within is “made up” and created by us: our realities are hand-picked.² These curated narratives have value too: Roest shares that “a tree is made up. So if we make up things like paintings or morals or ethics or whatever, it is, to me, as valuable as a tree.”³ But can this be? Becuase we have created narratives and objects, that they can be of the same value as created things which we have not made? I think value is important in order to distinguish between objects and experiences, but, an equalising view of reality slightly diminishes the meaning of value and the nature of it. To compare the value of a tree, for example, with the value of a painting seems to be beside the point… Of this idea, art operates, I think, on a different plane which does not fall under the same values. And there are further questions too: who are these objects valuable to? Where and when, also? This idea of equalising value, in my view, can seem to equalise reality, and any values which we place on it. Is value totally prescriptive? Is art, then, of the same value? In terms of art specifically, it has nearly always offered an escape, in my experience, whether that be pleasant or not, painful or pleasurable. Art has (and does) open us up to an irreality, or unreality. Its either subtle or distinct separation with reality, makes it art. To talk of value, do we not need to agree on what value is? Further than this, what does it mean to be valuable or not?

However, in this exhibition, Roest explores the spiritual and the angelic.

Europa Gallery’s press release opens with, “for Robert Roest, the act through which sensory information is reproduced, imitated, and transfigured into thought, speech, dreams, images, film, art, writing and so forth, is an evolutionary survival tactic. It creates meaning”.⁴ I find this incredibly interesting because it is the existentialist philosophy that we, as individuals, are responsible for creating our own meanings;⁵ we must curate. Art can embellish reality, and construct it even.

Exploring Roest’s previous work, I became very intrigued by words and text that he used to supplement his work, specifically his 2021 exhibition “Indoor feelings and single-door kennels in your soul.” The exhibit features an array of painted images of dogs that seem to be angry, distressed, barking, or even yawning. It is impossible to tell the emotional valency of the images, yet they carry their weight. Here, Roest discusses the deception of the human mind, focusing on how our minds seek to always create meanings from images and things, and ideas.⁶ The dogs, which he paints, are from memes and YouTube videos which he extracted, and it speaks to the virtual worlds in which we operate, whilst also hinting at the literal representation of a dog: a pet of loyalty which has been anthropomorphised. Roest questions whether the human is as tame as the dog and whether the human is better off as untamed or tamed.⁷ But what does it mean to tame? Is being tamed being unfree? He poses final remarks on his work – “if you penetrate deep enough into the jaws of the beast, you may realise, there is no beast.”⁸ I think this speaks loudly to his approach to art; it is a form of reality alteration that can widen one’s gaze of reality, daring to reach the impossible.

“Eight Paintings Proving Angels Are Really Watching Over Us is a modified found title lifted from a viral listicle that collected and documented the choice moments in which clouds form uncanny resemblances of angels. The article and its title fascinated Roest: the implied challenge, the mental leap it asks of the reader: cloud, photo, angel, and proof of it even!“⁹

This “mental leap” which Roest talks of is one also of illusion and deception – are they photos or paintings, or both? Where are we – in the countryside, in a lit up city, by the sea, a small country lane? The works play with our understandings of what a painting is and can be, as well as exploring the visual cues it offers.   

We always want to find a meaning or pattern or sign, and here Roest couldn’t be more explicit in this sign – the sign of the angel, as referred to in the title. But this meaning offers no comfort. In fact, it disrupts. It is confusing the senses – where are we? What is this figure? Perhaps he has hit exactly reality – we are lost and confused and trying to find or attempt to become unlost and found. 

The representation that we see of an angel or divinity in the clouds is so true of reality – we are constantly looking to find the immaterial and bring it to earth. 

I think Roest exactly challenges this – our capacity to deceive ourselves. Even here we have deceived ourselves, we are still as lost as we were from the beginning. Roest highlights this fundamental pattern and condition of the human mind. 

When we look at the clouds, our eyes and mind are able to swiftly adjust, creating a link between the cloud and an image of an angel until they become one, until the angel image has been ascribed to the cloud. Our brains have been washed to see the angel. And we do see it. But it doesn’t feel right. We were never meant to see the angel, never meant to grasp the ungraspable and immaterial. 

It is almost like a false promise. Our deception has proved to be even more illusive than before. 

The title speaks volumes also in terms of religious and spiritual imagery – “eight paitings proving angels are really watching over us”: does faith have proof? Through image, it does. We are reminded of idols, of worship, of prayer, of icons. Where is the proof? It’s in the painting. The clouds look like angels – therefore they are angels. The ultimate manifestation.

1. https://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/robert-roest-on-idols-angels-and-the-anthropocene ↩︎
2. Ibid. ↩︎
3. Ibid. ↩︎
4. https://europa.nyc/exhibitions/eight-paintings-proving-angels-are-really-watching-over-us ↩︎
5. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/ ↩︎
6. https://www.robertroest.nl/indoor-feelings-and-single-door-kennels-in-your-soul/ ↩︎
7. Ibid. ↩︎
8. Ibid. ↩︎
9. https://europa.nyc/exhibitions/eight-paintings-proving-angels-are-really-watching-over-us ↩︎