Renowned Belfast-born artist Robert Janz returned to live again in Ireland in preparation for his first solo exhibition of paintings and sculpture at the Peppercanister Gallery in August 2006. Well-known in Europe and America he is a regular exhibitor in New York and Los Angeles and exhibited some years ago at the Oliver Dowling Gallery in Dublin. He also had a memorable exhibition of wall drawings at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in the past and recently held a residency at IMMA. Now in his seventies, he is deeply concerned with civilisation’s increasing encroachment on the natural environment and his poetic art is a passionate plea for greater restraint.

Robert is a versatile performance artist, painter, sculptor and a printmaker. His works are explorations of and comments on aspects of motion, change and transience. Many of these works are highly temporary, such as his water drawings on rock, which soon after drawing, evaporate. Other works, paintings and ink drawings on paper and linen, explore in serial form the flux and temporality of life. Janz’s recent paintings have chronicled the life span of flowers sequentially, through arcs of time and the processes of budding, blooming and decaying. He sees his flower paintings as a comment on mortality and the transient nature of life: "... the life of a flower is a compact summary of mortality." In the same way he intentionally creates sculpture from materials such as twigs, fragile and impermanent, to suggest that nothing lasts forever. The fragility and current state of our environment is a major concern for the artist and he wants to increase the awareness of the viewer through his own subtle means.

Over the years Robert has managed to combine the performance aspects of his art with his more traditional skills as a draughtsman. These he calls "process drawings" when during the course of an exhibition he would draw, redraw, and erase an image from the wall of his performance space over the course of a week or so. The resulting image was altered and transformed on a day-to-day basis. Working during the day, so that people could see his drawing evolve, Janz allowed visitors to glimpse the procedure of creating a work of art; the process rather than the product was of primary importance.

For further information and updates see Robert’s websites at http://www.postrix.com and http://www.driftdiary.com