Elliott Jamal Robbins at Park View/Paul Soto

(link)

The commitment to drawing, rather the juiced paintings they could be monied as, seems important. "A difference between cartoons/comics and paintings is that comics ask you to understand them but paintings ask you to identify them." A drawing seems intended that you understand it. And so when the murky demands of painting enter them, there becomes a confusion of subject. Hazing aesthetic demands. The artist waits to pull the light-cord of an idea, the phallic gun of abstraction's seminal order, onto a conveyer belt of canvas, gets his identity in order, Tap, Click, POW, Splash, Whoosh, Whir, and Tssk, a production is all too mechanic, paint a depressing fog, maybe a spray of brains. 

See too: Elliott Jamal Robbins at Kai Matsumiya

Elliott Jamal Robbins at Kai Matsumiya

(link)

discombobulating the characters, Snow White and the black protagonist cultural antipodes, forced atop each other, its Disney surely dissonant with black male experience: a snippet plays stating that a lot of women were roused to voting early which would have felt reassuring then had we not later learned white women voted Trump. Sadness feeling most intense when there is nothing to be done with it, can't be channeled, and the depression of your body on the mattress becomes sinister cave, stuck to National Public Radio's days before the US election, an anachronism replayed in your head, is made worse in actually having the recording. Enough emotional dissonance eventually causing psychologic desensitization, feeling a lot like living slumber.