BRASIL: Alan Robb's new body of work has been made over the last four years following a visit to Brazil in 2000. The deepest impression came from the artist's encounter with the belief systems of Candomblé and Macumba. God and the familiar Christian saints rub shoulders with, and sometimes blend into, spirits and demons taken to Brazil by West African slaves. God's presence in Brazil is as 'Nosso Senhor do Bonfim', Our Lord of the Good End. The Black Madonna is now the patron saint of Brazil, while the armour-plated St Jorge is Ogum, the orixä of iron, thunder and lightning - of war. Beside them stand spirits like Ze Pelintra, who intercedes between man and the deities, Pomba Gira, the louche queen of life's crossroads, the female devil - Exu, the shape-changing Oxumare and Yamanja, the sea goddess with her staff. Modern influences continue the process: the sardonic Ze Pelintra greets us in white fedora and suit, and Caboclo, a Hindu swami made footloose by globalisation, has found a welcoming berth. All are depicted in images and statues on sale in specialist shops or stalls. Theirs is a sensual theatre of mortal danger and hope of redemption, in which the spirits offer guidance, protection and punishment of their enemies. Their earthiness isn't an effect simply of their origins and history, but of their being linked to contemporary experience and the forms of everyday life - and death. From the artist's point of view, the rough plaster models are touchstones that have opened a way into a very different painterly world from any that he has previously explored.

The paintings are intensely concentrated, each meticulously painted to realise the elusive intuition out of which it arises. To 'realise' means both to make and to know, and this is crucial to their focused power: making becomes knowing. The effort to make is the artist's effort to uncover his own purposes, his relationship with his subject and, inevitably, with paintings as an art. Behind the painted protagonists stand the crude popular figurines, but Robb (following a trait in much of his work) refines and perfects them, and so removes them from their material origins, liberating them as ideas, psychic entities, gatekeepers between light and dark. Technical deftness is essential to his re-imagining, not to pull tricks of perception on the viewer but to unlock the inner life of these images that haunt his imagination. It enables the viewer to suspend disbelief and enter the game of art. They are not borrowings made ironic by a change of context, or anthropological studies of another culture and even less are they commentaries on others' religious beliefs. They are a response to an encounter that, being unable to shrug off, the artist has had no choice but to confront, to find their meaning for him. Spirits have the power to possess, but so does the artist, through the achieved image. Paradoxically, it can be through punctilious attention to the surface of things that their essence can be grasped.

This project entails a clash of cultures, specifically in the meeting of the artist's native rational and classicising aesthetic sympathies with the mind's unruly undercurrents, archetypes and fears expressed through the spirits of Macumba. The incongruity of the alien and the unfamiliar, unified by the painter's consistent vision, gifts to the paintings their tension and strangeness. But then, the spirits of Candomblé and Macumba themselves already have precisely that same heady mixture.

Euan McArthur , 2004

• THE REBEL ANGELS
by Robertson Davies, 1981

• IN THE MIND'S EYE
by Euan McArthur

• TRUE KNOWLEDGE
a catalogue note for solo exhibition at East West Contemporary Art, London

• INVENTION, ILLUSION & REALITY
(I LIVE NOW)
By Euan McArthur, including a catalogue note by the Artist (4th April 1999) for the show: Invention, Illusion and Reality, at East West, London.

• BRASIL
by Euan McArthur

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