User:Carmineclaire/sandbox

He moved to London in 1975, accompanying his friend Lester Queripel, hoping to launch his career as a musician and a poet. Robilliard did not have any formal training as a painter, but he had started writing poetry and making drawings in Guernsey. However, there are no traces of these early poems and drawings: according to Lester Queripel in a letter to Gilbert & George dated 12th November 1988, he consistently destroyed his work as he did not want to be called a "sissy" by his friends. In London, he lived in the Shoreditch area, and shared a studio with Andrew_Heard from 1983 onwards. The artist was also his partner. He met Gilbert & George around 1979, and became one of their models. He featured as in the film "The World of Gilbert and George" in 1981, repeatedly stating the phrase "I am angry"; his character is described as a "Shot Youth" in the storyboard of the film. The artist duo supported his poetry, also encouraging Robilliard to associate images to his written work. They published his first poetry volume, Inevitable, in 1984. His first exhibition of drawing in the same year, at the Stephen Bartley Gallery, was originally only meant as a backdrop to the book's launch. Stephen Bartley describes the way the exhibition developed: "the exhibition was conceived at short notice in collaboration with Andrew Heard, most of the drawings (other than those used in the books) were done in the two weeks before the show. I suggested that David and Andrew hire a few frames so that the drawings could be hung as a backdrop to the party. I was amazed when they produced some 40 pieces and mounted a professional show. Everything was priced at £75, no catalogue was produced because we were concentrating on the book. One sale to Anthony d'Offay resulted. (...) The exhibition was taken down the day after as the frames had to be returned."

His second volume of poetry was published in 1987.

The drawings were only initiallly meant to be a few to serve as a backdrop but by the beginning of the launch Robilliard had produced 40 of them.

His drawings were also exhibited at l'Escargot, where the first public reading of his poetry took place, performed by Stephen Chamberlain. David Robilliard did not want to perform his own poetry live; instead, he recruited people to perform his poetry for him. This included artists such as Leo Burley, who relates his experience in "Memory of a Friend".

On the invitation card for the exhibition, Gilbert & George described Robilliard as "the new master of the modern person. Looking, thinking, feeling, seeing, bitching - he brilliantly encapsulates the 'Existers' spirit of our time." He had another exhibition at James Birch Fine Ar t in 1985 and 1986, at Art & Project in Amsterdam in 1986, at Birch & Conan Fine Arts in

The format in which he published his poetry changed: through 1987, he distributed shorter poems on postcards that were then sent through the post to a small mailing list. The poems were printed on an old letterpress by the art dealer Paul Conran. They distributed a poem card through the post each month in 1987. In December 1987, the twelve poems cards were reprinted by Birch & Conran as A Box of Poems in an edition of 100 copies; the first 30 copies contained a live cassette recording of Robilliard reading each poem. Birch & Conran also posthumously published poem cards for August to December 1988. His poem cards were also produced by Gilbert & George, Hercules Fisherman, Judy Adam and Lorcan O' Neill.

Quotes

Leo Burley was a friend of David Robilliard and was also recruited by him to perform his poetry. He says of him in his commemorative essay, "Memories of a Friend": "His later paintings represent a honing down of all past themes - sexuality, cosmology, love, bitchery and nighclubbing to name but a few - into a razor-sharp comment on mortality, his own, ours, yours."

Gilbert & George wrote a commemorative text on David Robilliard, "Our David", dated July 7th, 1990: "David Robilliard was the sweetest, kindest, most infuriating, artistic, foul-mouthed, witty, sexy charming, handsome, thoughtful, unhappy, loving and friendly person we ever met. Over the nine years of our friendship David came closer to us than any other person. He will live forever in our hearts and minds. Starting with pockets filled with disorganised writings and sketches, he went on to produce highly original poetry, drawings and paintings. His truthfulness, sadness, desperation and love of people gave his work a brilliance and beauty that stands out a mile. Not a day passes without our thinking of David. His works live on for us all as a spiritual, cultural force and a great lesson in human love."

Rudi Fuchs wrote in 1992: "David Robilliard chose to combine poetry and painting, free from the conventions of both. The combination gave his art a unique and unspoiled freshness. I know that his intelligence and wit appealed very much to people of his own generation who no longer wished to be bothered with the heavy-handedness of middle-aged culture. I am sad he is no longer with us; because there was yet much to be done."

Marka Bloems writes in "No Fluff in my Stuff" for the exhibition catalogue: "By reading the texts and looking at the images, David Robilliard's world becomes clear to us; we understand his fears, his humour, how he has been hurt, and his involvement with art. And it is through his naiveté that his work both pleases us and asks us to think about the world around us (...)

"Like the best art, Robilliard didn't reflect or simply portray the world around him, he changed it; the world became more like his paintings, not the other way round."

"The simplicity and directness of his poems and paintings is also just as easily misunderstood or misread. These are not simple statements but exist within various registers of meaning. All subcultures create a language for themselves for which multiple coding is often used as a means of survival. Words and images communicate recognition and belonging; the straight, other world gaining a very different understanding. It may well be that his work is taken as being about the gay culture he inhabited; but is strength is found in the direct realism he expresses and the way that his meaning is strained and delivered through a precise and individual use of language, which is itself a particular way of remaking the world. In Robilliard's poems the key to this is the individual voice he adopts. It is chatty and about himself, his feelings and experiences - even when he is writing about something or somebody else, it is all about him. In effect he writes self-portraits; and is concerned with how things strike him. This isn't self-conscious or self-expressive, but is instead observational. He is truthful about the emotions he describes here or invokes, but it is not something he plays on or makes a meal of. The poems convey his recognition of the feelings of love and dissappointment. But then he moves on; and through observation, a view of the world - his world - is constructed, made, as if real. His bittersweet view of the world is a result of the introspective reflection of the life he led."

Caroline Collier writes of his work in her essay 'Climate': “The tone of David Robilliard’s paintings ... [which] use phrases that seem to have been snatched from the filofaxes of advertising copywriters or from the jingles of DJs and at other times refer to the language of enchantment, to fables and stories, is sometimes lyrical, occasionally abrasive, intentionally challenging and unsettlingly obscene: their content is invariably an expression of the position of being homosexual in Britain in the late 1980s.”

His drawings from 1984 onwards are mainly portraits. They are portraits of people he observed but also acquaintances such as Andrew Heard, Gilbert & George, Duggie Fields. He was charged with finding models for Gilbert & George in Soho, as well as the east and west ends. Almost all of the 58 paintings he produced between 1987 and 1988 were portraits.

He frequented the London club and pub scene, a familiar presence in places such as Blitz, where Andrew Heard worked in the 1970s, Heaven and the Café de Paris, The Bell in King's Cross and the French House in Soho.

He introduced himself as "David Robilliaids" once he was diagnosed as HIV positive in the last year of his life.

He had a solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, 1987)

David Robilliard died as a result of AIDS, in 1988. His work was shown in a post-humous exhibition in 1990, at the Hirsch & Adler Modern gallery in New York. It was also included within the group exhibition The British Art Show 1990 at the South Bank Centre in London. Museum director Rudi Fusch continued to champion his work, curating a retrospective on his works in 1993 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam entitled "A Roomful of Hungry Looks".

as well as Hans Ulrich Obrist, who had met the artist in 1987. He was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the ICA in 2014.

Exhibition history

Published in underground periodicals: The Fred, Square Peg, The Manipulator

Birch & Conran exhibition

L'Escargot restaurant exhibitionHippodrome exhibitionPost-humous exhibitions:Hirsch & Adler Modern, 1990, New York