Description
What fascinates Bob Camblin is clearly the complex and very delicate relationship between image and language. All his works have strange or fantastic titles – titles that considerably deepen or modify the perception and understanding of the picture. His landscapes, which are often vistas, with nothing mysterious or intriguing about them, can even at first sight pass as conventional works; but they take on a quiet different connotation when you find, for example, that one of them is called “Venus”.
…In Venus, Lady Liberty is “skinny dipping in the Sul Ross Bayou with a torch to ward off mosquitoes.” She resembles a fairy-tail illustration, surrounded by ornamental lettering and phantasmagorical characters set in a totally unreal atmosphere (a Galveston seashell?). When you examine Venus more closely you very quickly realize that it contains a universe that only reveals itself very slowly: a towering Lady Liberty torch ablaze, diaphanous figures, a landscape, words of wisdom from David Hilbert the German mathematician… In other words, Bob Camblin is an artist who does not to give everything away immediately. His pictures are constructed like devices foe ensnaring the viewer’s attention, seeking to capture and imprison it; his aim is to fascinate the viewer and persuade her to adventure further and further into the terra incognita of speculative experience.
His delicate chromatic treatment, the sophistication of his optical pitfalls, and the deep subtlety of his allusions make each of his works an intricate device for simulation. His claim on our attention is through his skill in allusion and deception. He traps us, and leads us into a poetic continent in which words and figures unite to set up stratagems from the other side of the pictorial mirror; they reflect back into ourselves, hinting at the secret of their language but never really revealing it. ~ Gerard-Georges Lemaire, translated from French