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- Sep 9, 2023
- 2 min read

Tony Robins' Narrative Minimalism

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SATURDAY EVENING POST

September 9th, 2023

“This work explores Narrative Minimalism within the visual landscape of translation and transmediation, or ‘texts’ and images, in order to seek new semiotic perspectives and affordances. The work springs from a thirty-year immersive interest in the effect of context on meaning.”

Tony Robins is concerned with the aesthetics of the minimal and the poetic and mysterious qualities that inhabit his creations. One can see the architect in the artist, but it is the romanticism that Robins possesses that often seeps from the core of his work. The choice in the material he uses for his works cannot divorce his practice as an architect, his use of these materials is sensible, and it is never too severe to be beautiful. On the surface, there is a complex language of materials, and his work is rational, lucid, and reductive, but it presents a plain beauty of very well made object.

This diptych of treated copper, with an image of the copper translated into the Base64 medium laser etched into black acrylic makes reference to Donald Judd and others who placed a priority on materiality and proportion, indulging in the minimalism of the copper but a comment on the visceral delight of the metal versus the unintelligible and slick cyber-medium of its transmediation. It changes the modernist indulgence in materiality, void of overt meaning other than its signification, as it sits with its Base64 counterpart, a non-minimalist ‘text’ aligning itself with minimalism by being a vast and almost homogeneous field.

Base64 is a digital language, a method for converting all kinds of data, such as text, image, or emojis, into a format that can be easily shared and understood by computers. Base64, utilizing caps and small letters in the alphabet, 0 to 9, + and /, makes for 64 variations, it acts as a more effective language than binary code of 0s and 1s, each set of binary codes (six 0s and 1s) can be expressed as one character in Base64, simplifying and shortening the code, and allowing the insertion of images, sounds, and text in a message. Base64 also ensures that the data remains intact without modification during transport.

Copper by Tony Robins

2017, treated copper and laser engraved gloss black acrylic on maple frame,

edition of 5, 48 x 96 in. is on view now. Please contact us for more information.

Image credit: Kyle Juron