Optic & Masturbation

Robert Russell

Robert Russell. Yahrzheit Candle

—What’s the personal or symbolic significance of teacups in your work?

—The teacup is a domestic object, often feminized and overlooked. But it’s also fragile, and it holds something. In my paintings, it becomes a kind of stand-in for memory or grief and even death—something small that contains more than it seems. It’s a take on the tradition of Vanitas or Momento Mori — a nod to still life painting, and the quiet radicality of attention. I created these works during the COVID pandemic when our domestic lives took over and we couldn’t leave the house ,,, —So with what we just talked about, what are you hoping to convey?

—That beauty isn’t an escape from pain—it’s a way through it. That the act of painting can hold contradictions without collapsing them. That mourning is a form of meaning-making. Maybe even that painting itself is a kind off mourning ,,, —You have a solo presentation coming up in October, with Anat Ebgi, at Frieze, titled “The Work of Mourning.” What’s the story behind that title? —The central objects are mass-produced yahrzeit candles—grief, made for the shelves of markets. I’m drawn to their bluntness and anonymity. And yet they’re used in deeply personal rituals. That contradiction became the basis for the project. They’re not beautiful in an obvious sense. But they mean something. You light one when someone dies, or when you want to say that I haven’t forgotten. You don’t light it for you—you light it for them. And maybe for the silence between you –Like a still life for the afterlife.

The title comes from Jaques Derrida— he writes that mourning is not something we finish, but something we do. To mourn ethically, he says, is to remain faithful to the other’s singularity—to resist turning them into part of ourselves, or allowing their absence to be absorbed and forgotten. That paradox is at the core of this new work: how do I attend to what’s gone, without appropriating it? How do I hold space for grief in a world that prizes efficiency, sameness, repetition and forgetting?—there’s mourning, there’s honor, there’s the impossibility of grief—but honestly, what’s most salient for me is the quiet. The restraint. The refusal to make drama out of death