(Excerpt from essay by Stuart Elliott featured in Remove the Truth exhibition catalogue 2020.)

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"Scott Robson’s standard way of working is essentially that of establishing a trajectory, a conceptual path with predetermined reference markers to develop an evolving dialogue with the subject material and its range of interpretive architectures.  By ‘dialogue’, what is meant is the necessary process of making any art that seeks to avoid simple illustration, no matter how skilled, or the relentlessly efficient pursuit of a given conceptual goal with as little distraction as possible.  With any meaningfully resolved art, i.e. that which avoids a straight Q&A transaction, there needs to be some smelling of the roses, some surveying of alternative pathways to a worthwhile end.  

Robson’s approach to the Remove the Truth project is a nuanced, intuitive engagement for each painting from its very genesis.  This methodology may not be that of the classic stream of consciousness, but rather a far more reflexive, localized decision making process. Often from an obscure starting point and building organically from this, each painting becomes essentially a ‘colony of the unconscious’ for want of a better descriptor. 

There is very much a sense of the dreamscape wherein that which is depicted might not necessarily be that which is literally meant.  Dreams themselves it has been suggested, are like books (sensory input) being deposited at an archive (cognition system) but these packets of information on route to their correct shelves can become interdicted, shuffled and one of the functions of dreaming is to straighten out these minor collisions. Like any sorting process, transitory compositions and associations occur mostly with little intrinsic meaning.  The profound and the banal may occasionally change places.  In Tarot, the Death Card is surely self-evident.  When inverted though, the meaning is ‘continuance’ rather than termination.  Thus the same information can be radically obverse.  Like Robson’s work here, much information while individually ‘factual’, can undergo multiple syntactical and interpretive redefinitions.  

There are some constants such as hand signing, animal forms and ‘birthing’ but as in any hypnotic or dream scape, it is risky to affix a definite metaphoric ‘truth’.  Whether cadaver of beast or vehicle, bug or body part, in essence ‘the’ definitive truth has been supplanted by potentially innumerable Delphic ‘truths’."

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