He stands in the middle of a table, covered with a black cloth. He is also wrapped in it, fixed in his own staging. Every time he turns around, the fabric gets caught and threatens to pull the table with it. The gesture is awkward, almost comical. We laugh — a nervous laugh.
John Robinson draws cards from the tarot deck and asks each of us to choose three — the past, the present, the future. He speaks incessantly, carried by that unstoppable, biting English humor. Everything seems improvised, even absurd — and yet every word falls into place with an almost ruthless precision. What he reveals cuts to the bone: love, betrayal, disillusionment, shame. The audience wavers between amusement and discomfort.
During People Ruin Paintings John Robinson presents three performances that serve as the basis for future paintings.
A collective alphabet board composed of twenty-six letters and two additional cards — YES and NO — is activated on the ground floor. Participants place rolled paintings over their heads, converting canvases into provisional masks that at once conceal the face and turn the body into part of the apparatus of address. Questions are directed to unseen presences while Robinson transcribes the resulting letters and responses onto a whiteboard, translating the séance into a public exercise in unstable notation. The work hinges on the tension between earnest invocation and evident failure: language appears only in fragments, coherence remains perpetually deferred, and the promise of communication is sustained precisely through its breakdown. In this way, the ritual stages not revelation but the persistence of desire in the face of its own impossibility.
A long table draped in black cloth becomes the site of extended tarot sessions. Visitors select cards for past, present, and future; the artist reads them aloud. The format refuses privacy: interpretation unfolds in front of the room, with embarrassment and exposure treated as structural materials rather than incidental effects. At the centre of the table, Robinson emerges through an opening in the cloth which also functions as his robe, so that the performance binds body, costume, and stage into a single continuous surface. This arrangement is crucial to the work's logic. It renders the artist at once enthroned and trapped, officiant and appendage of the apparatus he has constructed. It lends the reading an unstable authority: part oracle, part spectacle, part self-imposed entanglement. Here divination operates not as prediction but as an apparatus for testing authorship and control — who may speak, who is rendered legible, and how a 'reading' redistributes agency between performer and participant.
On the upper floor, the performance shifts from divination to a deliberately abject bodily rite. The artist is subjected to a sequence of accumulations and degradations — egged, covered in flour, doused in chocolate sauce — so that the body is progressively transformed into a surface of excess, slapstick, and humiliation. The scene moves with a kind of disreputable theatricality, in which camp, farce, and violation are difficult to separate. Robinson then enters the bathtub in a staged act of baptism, only to be struck with inflatable swords and bananas, extending the action's unstable oscillation between mock-ritual and ordeal. Nothing here resolves into purification or transcendence. Instead, the performance drives the body toward exhaustion, leaving behind residue rather than redemption.
© Jolien Chielens
