Elliott Jamal Robbins
Feats of Strength
June 1st - Jul 19th
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Feats of Strength is a new body of work by Elliott Jamal Robbins that explores fragmentation, desire, and the tension between visibility and erasure. Among the references that shape the work, the influence of Jean Genet is particularly resonant—especially in the stop-motion watercolor sequence Phantasmagoria, whose title nods to Genet’s theatricality and fascination with illusion, contradiction, and disappearance. Like Genet’s layered language—abject and erotic, political and dreamlike—Robbins’ compositions resist moral clarity and narrative cohesion. They stack unstable images atop one another, enacting rather than explaining. The work embraces contradiction and fragmentation, lingering in interior states and unresolved gestures. In Phantasmagoria, a figure leans into a kiss only to dissolve frame by frame into smoke. Painting by painting, gesture vanishes. The act is performed and undone, seen and unmade.

As Anne Carson writes in Eros the Bittersweet, “Desire moves. Eros is a verb. It requires a space to cross.” Robbins dwells in that space—the interval between touch and disappearance, presence and absence, yearning and collapse. His images are suspended mid-gesture, capturing eros not as fulfillment but as tension, delay, deferral.

In Feats of Strength, Robbins assembles note card-sized drawings, works on paper, and small paintings that drift between intimacy and rupture, legibility and refusal. Often left unframed, these modestly scaled compositions maintain a raw, notational quality. They function not as closed narratives, but as fragments—an index of sensations, tensions, and private symbols that resist resolution.

The works frequently revolve around the figure of a protagonist—a spectral or sometimes cartoonish presence who reappears in various guises across drawings and animations. This central figure seems to navigate a collapsing interior world filled with distortions and surreal thresholds. Portals recur throughout the series: shadowed doors opening into the desert Southwest; a square of pink mist hovering in an ambiguous field; the glowing face of a TV set viewed from a couch—each a threshold between the visible and the unknowable. These visual doorways are not escape routes so much as mirrors for longing, confinement, or absurdity.

Robbins’ visual language often invokes the uncanny charm of animation, including contorted Disney-like figures that are stretched, broken, or made strange. There is humor here—at times slapstick, at times haunting—where familiar forms buckle under emotional weight or collapse into nonsense. The result is a world that feels as internally logical as it is psychically unstable.

Born in Muskogee, Oklahoma, Robbins works with watercolor, collage, and animation-inspired linework to construct liminal spaces shaped by memory and cultural pressure. While his work remains deeply aware of the history and politics of representation, Feats of Strength is not about representation per se. It is equally a critique of representation—an interrogation of what it demands, what it reveals, and what it forecloses. As Robbins notes:

“I still believe deeply in the importance of representation, particularly representations of Black people and Black life—but I seek a mode of working that is not servile to didacticism or performativity. It remains a radical act, I think, to be Black and solely or primarily concerned with interiority—concerned with anti-performance, with the invisible or the unspoken.”

That insistence on interiority extends to a suspicion of aestheticism itself. Robbins’s work acknowledges the seduction of surface, beauty, and legibility—but never surrenders to them. They must be interrogated not merely for its quality but for its signified act of violence. If performance reduces interiority to spectacle, then aesthetic polish risks reducing the unknowable to image. Feats of Strength holds itself at that edge: resisting beauty when it threatens to flatten, resisting coherence when it promises false resolution. His is a practice of deliberate unmaking—a refusal of aesthetic compliance in favor of psychic truth.

This refusal—of spectacle, coherence, or tidy narrative—threads through the entire project. Robbins’ note cards, many begun in 2019, are dense with diaristic inscriptions, coded marks, and emotional residue. Influenced also by David Lynch’s idea that a film can be constructed from 70 index cards, Robbins builds a deliberately impossible narrative: one of rupture, drift, and recurrence. Nothing settles. Each fragment pushes against the next.

This refusal—of spectacle, coherence, or tidy narrative—threads through the entire project. Robbins’ note cards, many of which originated around 2019, are dense with coded marks, diaristic inscriptions, and emotional residue. Influenced also by David Lynch’s idea that a film can be constructed from 70 index cards, Robbins builds a deliberately impossible narrative: a visual language of rupture, drift, and recurrence. Nothing settles. Each fragment pushes against the next.

The result is a body of work animated by a constellation of unresolved binaries: strength and fragility, submission and power, beauty and violence, sacred and profane. These forces are not reconciled but held in dynamic tension. Robbins doesn’t aim to resolve contradictions—he lets them live beside each other.

At the intersection of personal narrative and cultural imagery, Feats of Strength explores how systemic trauma registers in the body and psyche, and how visual culture conditions our ways of seeing and being seen. Yet despite its heavy themes, the work is imbued with grace, play, and a quiet sensuality. Line becomes a mode of drift. Color and gesture become sites of interruption.

And painting—perhaps the most burdened of representational forms—is, for Robbins, not a fixed statement but a site of flicker and slippage. In Feats of Strength, painting is treated not as the end point of depiction, but as something that can be undone, unmoored, even animated. Several works are literally subsumed into film, becoming moving images that stutter and evaporate. Robbins turns painting into phantasmagoria—a medium of haunted surfaces, projected absences, and impossible proximities.

Feats of Strength is not a resolution, but a refusal of resolution. It is a study in collapse and persistence—of the image, the body, and the story that can never quite be told.