Purity through passion – Interview with Robin Sperling, British artist living in Hungary

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Author: Diana Pataky

Robin Sperling combines elements of abstract and conceptual Art in his works. Although he has lived in many parts of the world according to sustainable principles, his works are inspired not by landscape but by the permanence of raw materials, the relationship between nature and man, harmony and the paradox of conflict. We talked to artist Robin Sperling.

You spent the early years of your life on the continent of Africa, where you were first drawn to the magnitude of the dried-up, cracked fault lines of rivers, which over the years became the key motifs of your art. A constant recurring element of your oeuvre is longing back to childhood. You once said that when you moved to the Great Hungarian Plains "behind God's back" 24 years ago, you found your way back to the silence you thought was lost.

For me, pure silence means living existence in itself, which helps me find my way back to my roots. Like most people, the big city didn't give me the comfort I instinctively wanted. After Africa, I moved to the United Kingdom and then to Berlin – this is where I met and became a deep friend of fashion designer Tamás Király. The underground artist aroused my interest in Hungarian culture, and partly as a result of my meetings with Hungarian artists living in Berlin, I started looking for a home in Hungary.

When my friend Zeno Monory and I found the mercenary castle in Tiszainoka, I felt my ancestor's Kenyan cattle farm, its buildings and memories of happiness revived in a Hungarian environment. It was as if I had arrived in a tribal village in Africa, where I had seen such mud-made, adobe-walled, straw-roofed houses before. There was a huge square in front of me, and I could almost see the village elders sitting in a circle. In one room, a lamp radiated the Sienese red rays like a perfect sphere. This sight reminded me of the tribal world mentioned. The colour of melancholy like clotted blood is not to be seen either in England or France. I thought that this was somehow related to the Hungarian spirit, which, although it sounds ghostly, is also uniquely beautiful.

"It was a symbol of arrival for me."

As I looked at the landscape, I felt that the vertical line of my body intersected the horizon, like a cross, but not necessarily in a Christian quality, but rather as space and time intersect. If the horizon symbolizes the infinite future and the vertical represents the unrepeatable present, there must be some space between the two. The idea of this crossing and intersection interested me enormously. What kind of relationship can an individual have with the world in which he belongs both to himself and to the infinite? I saw this moment before me as a painting inspired by the Greek Aperion, meaning infinite space, the idea of the fullness of existence.

Beyond the dried-up riverbed, what other motifs of nature inspire you in your art?

Like Robert Smithson, the great American artist who worked on the border between conceptual art and land art, I am also very interested in the possibilities of expression in soil and its components. The elementary colours found in the soil are archaic in the sense that they come from various rocks, fossils. In my works of art, I use sand, clay and everything else I can get my hands on; I transform this into art, or I already use them as art material. In a sense, creation is a game of feelings, a series of perpetual decisions; Only the artist knows exactly what philosophical decision really lies behind his choice of material. My father worked with sand and cement as an architect; As I watched him, I saw how dusts and substances, such as water, could influence colour. It is no different in painting. In my case, creation is also seen as an alchemical marriage, which for me means both striving to create new materials and creating the spiritual background for works of art.

In your pictures you can see sprouted wild tobacco seeds, fluff, volcanic ash, molten wax, and industrial and electronic waste. Other times you use oil spills as a symbol of an oil-based economy. Although all of the above outlines the deep passion and respect you have for nature, what determines what material you use?

 

As an artist, I feel obliged to look for alternatives to show respect for nature and reflect on global social problems, such as the dangers of an economy based on petroleum use. When I first saw traces of oil extraction in the cornfields of Vojvodina, it was a kind of "Smithsonian" moment: when you step out into the landscape and discover a material to work with. Each of these processes is site-specific in the sense that works of art are created in the actual space from which the thought or material in its raw form was derived. The sequence of these decisions is, in my reading, the process of creation itself (poiesis).

Studying your series Oil Blots (2009), one will notice the ancient power that pervades your art. In some works of art, the oil stains that emerge almost carry the moment of creation, as a cell begins to divide, or as we can see the "working" of microorganisms under a microscope. I read the same message from the other works in the series, but already encoded "between bars". Looking at the entire series together, the viewer feels as if we are starting from the birth of life and then jumping billions of years to an already regulated, advanced civilization. Can you tell us about that?

 

Oil Blots in this context are understood as "visual poems". At the heart of Oil Blots is "fossilized sunlight", "blood of the Earth". Part of the idea behind the series is related to Smithson's philosophy that time changes the texture and quality of matter, a transmutation that is perpetual. The other key motif the grid is a matrix of science and technology that merges with analogous materials found in nature. I chose this geometric pattern because the arguments of mathematics can be used to provide insights or predictions about natural processes—not only in practice, but also in art.

The pieces in your series, titled Wax Intaglios (2021), are made from wax layers mixed with pigment applied to wooden plates. Their appearance is powerful, contoured, monumental, just like the cosmos itself. Your painting Into the Storm is like light appearing for the first time in ancient darkness; your artwork Presence exudes creative, spiritual power, and Chromatic Chronos evokes a time in the birth of the world when gaseous matter did not yet condense into solids. How far am I from reality?

 

The series was influenced by the ideas of German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and German philosopher Immanuel Kant. According to Leibniz, we are surrounded by a divine, pure order and universal harmony, which can be contrasted with Kant's philosophy, which seeks to prove, broadly speaking, that behind order there is empiricism, that is, experience. Aware of all this, behind the series lies the question of divine order and experience, as well as the union of form and idea. The perpetual dance and cycle of these elements represent the spirit of life to me.

During my studies at Saint Martin's School of Art, I learned the technique of the so-called "blank canvas", which almost made me obsessed. The method is based on rediscovery: instead of painting a still life or depicting a nude, we enter empty space, where we have the opportunity to get to know our subconscious mind, so that it can then displace the world visible to the eye. In this case, very early, sometimes ancient, primordial forms begin to emerge in the creators. In fact, this is when real life "begins": "rebirth" starts from this conscious level, from discovering what is actually hidden within you, what it is that you have actually experienced. As a result, all this becomes a kind of psychological struggle, and the elements born in this way become the artist's own "primordial elements", with which he begins to create, play, and from this art is born.

Your work entitled Gestell has just arrived in Rome. If I understood correctly, you would like the work to become the property of a local priest. Is there a reverence for God and the practice of the Christian faith behind this, or does it "go beyond" that?

 

Behind this lies hope as a symbol of peace and the values inherent in Christianity, as well as the up-to-date nature of the Roman Catholic Church, whose leaders recognized man's burdened relationship to technology, economics and society. I could hardly imagine a nobler place for this work than the wall of a believer. The work of art entitled Gestell, which was created with the help of my assistant curator Vito Vojnits-Purcsár, undertakes to evoke and critique the complex relationship between man and technology. It is not necessarily about God and creation, but rather about how man can find his way back to the Creator through creation while freeing himself from the shackles of technology. The work of art attempts to represent Heidegger's concept of Gestell through artistic means. Are you planning an exhibition in the future? If so, where? Yes, I currently have exhibitions opening in Rome and soon in Berlin, but I have also been invited to Tokyo – but the Japanese exhibition is still under discussion.