ROBIN LOWE

His obsession with roads was born out of many years as a truck driver. “I have taken thousands of photos while driving, at all times of day and night, with the intent to use them as reference material. Roads are sexy and seductive and really massage the mind into telling the truth. The Road is a symbol of that journey and the fact that for better or worse, none of us really knows where we are going.”

In this exhibition, we viewers are psychic hitchhikers, dropped off on expertly realized yet dreamlike roadways, left to find a way to cope with gorgeous isolation. There’s an obvious direction in front of us but no beginning or end; there’s a horizon but only the promise of another, perhaps identical horizon farther on. The point is not movement, quite the opposite—we’re captured in one place, a road’s broad back dominating our first impressions like a wall, tricking perspective—but the evidence of movement is compelling, the view, we come to realise, unrestricted. We see beauty, exquisite detail in the layered landscapes, enlivened textures, and the brushed wake of ghost cars in macadam rivers. But any obvious purpose has been removed. The titles are playful. The distractions of human habitation are gone. Lowe’s road compositions elicit an existential apprehension, but our viewpoint, magically floating, liberates the imagination.

Text by Marc Grigorov. Courtesy Reflex Amsterdam, Amsterdam