What I liked about Walter Robinson was that he was good at being dark. He would say things like, “We live in a world filled with resentment, racism, stupidity and hate. The consumerist utopia sells us on the idea that a better world is possible. All you need is a little dishonesty,” with a casual matter-of-factness that dared you to argue with him. For someone whose head was almost certainly a great aquarium swimming with art and the strategies of artifice, he also had that quality of obdurate journalistic loyalty to facts, reality, and truth. 

He counterbalanced his grim outlook with a breezily playful and relentlessly deadpan sense of humor, so it was sometimes hard to tell when he was kidding or not—as when he “claimed as a figurative painter to have debuted in 1984 the first-ever painting of a nude flossing her teeth.” (Seriously, is this true? Where is it?)

His commitment to seeing things as he saw them and then saying out loud what he saw was inspirational, driven by sensitivity to the world rather than callousness. He seemed to recognize the necessity of seeing and thinking about the things that are hard to think about and see – and not just the things that are fun, sexy, and delicious (though much of all that made it into his repertoire too).   

At zing, we join the art world in remembering Walter for his sense of humor, his insight, art, and words:

The Wallyburger

two-page spread from “Big & Beautiful”

In zing #23, curator Charlie Finch explained Walter’s paintings of fast food hamburgers,  which he dubbed the Wallyburger, as so: 

The Wallyburger becomes more excessive the more you examine its contents: drip equivalence achieves statis in the paint Robinson meticulously applies, the tomatoes rolling into cheese in the imagery and the automatic Pavlovian drool which ensues. Never underestimate the power of a burger, even a painted one. . .

The Fertility Painting

from Pharmaceuticals

Naturally, when Walter wrote his own curator’s note for a project of paintings he contributed to zing #25, it was a work of art unto itself, ending on this note: 

The other works from that [Pharmaceuticals] show have found homes in important collections, thanks to Jeffrey Deitch, who included them in the survey of my work that he hosted at his gallery in October 2016. All save for the four-foot-square painting of a box of Tampax, that is. My ‘fertility painting’ I’m keeping for myself.

The Male Paintings

Oxford Dress Shirt Lands End, 2016, acrylic on paper, 12 x 9 in

When, in an interview for zingchat, Devon Dikeou asked Walter why he was painting so many shirts, he gave this as an explanation: 

I paint a lot of sexy girls, in the studio I’m surrounded by images of women—you know, no one is really interested in men as a subject, not men OR women. But I felt bad, I don’t want to seem a complete dog, so I needed a masculine line, for balance.

So the thing about the shirt paintings, is that they’re MEN’S shirts, so they’re male paintings. What’s more, the images come right from the catalogues, or more typically from advertising emails, and the shirts are all flattened, folded and squared off. They’re pinned down, baby, can’t move at all. They’re just torsos, figurally castrated!

Not some kind of visionary

When I interviewed Walter in 2013, I foolishly prodded him, trying to get him to take a stance on real art vs commercialism or something silly along those lines, and instead he gave me this:  

Early on I was interested in the idea of being straightforward and not pretending you’re some kind of visionary or something. It’s stupid. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.