Rob Miles — The Bird Kitchen — Catherine Putman Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

In 12 days: March 6 → May 24, 2025

At the Amsterdam Zoo, a space filled with feathers, anatomical plates, boxes of eggs, and disturbing knives magnetised to a wall… What is it? “It’s the bird kitchen!” a voice replies: an uncanny association of two words that do not go well together. It is probably this paradoxical spectacle that Rob Miles had come to look for, as a regular visitor to the Ménagerie at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. In his essay “Ape Theatre” (1992), John Berger wrote regarding another zoo: “In Basel we are watching a strange theatre in which, on both sides of the glass, the performers may believe they are an audience. On both sides the drama begins with resemblance and the uneasy relationship that exists between resemblance and closeness.”

For his new exhibition, Rob Miles first presents a series of artworks staging monkeys who are contemplating their window, and reptiles,amphibians, and insects in their vivariums. The spirit of Gilles Aillaud hovers over these paintings. A line links up the paintings and drawings that Rob Miles defines as his “line of enquiry”: it escapes his pencil or paintbrush when he represents himself as he draws, or takes the form of snakes in his images of zoos. This line is like the image of the drawing.

A frame cut out of wood repeats the silhouette of a screen with flattened perspective, at the margins of life and representation. On this medium, in a free and spirited gesture, Rob Miles has adorned the panels of the screen with images of snakes at the Jardin des Plantes. For inspiration, he looked closely at the composition on Japanese and Korean screens, namely chaekgeori, similar to Western cabinets of curiosities of the Renaissance. To the ears of the musician that he is, the title of the work, Snakescreen, sounds like “smoke screen” — a way of suggesting that there is more here than meets the eye. This artwork is among the most recent and free developments from a series of paintings based on numerous sketches made through observation at the Jardin des Plantes.

Another painting shows the monkey enclosure from a bird’s-eye view. Everything is shown simultaneously, on a single plane. The main ‘scene’ is surrounded by a gallery of images, in the manner of old geographical maps or medieval paintings. The gaze circulates among the riggings that serve as playgrounds for monkeys, another appearance of the “line of enquiry”. “But where are the monkeys?” children say. “But where are the monkeys?” ask visitors contemplating Rob Miles’ painting, in the same way. They are elsewhere.
Rob Miles seeks to paint the invisible.

Another room is dedicated to human activities: a swimming pool, a kitchen, a fashion shoot… Based on drawings of a mini-golf course Hastings Pirate Golf and hot springs in equally serpentine forms Spanish Hot Springs, other lines leap out at us, forming the curves of waterfalls. Rob Miles developed these images in the form of wood marqueteries: puzzle pieces that he later used as stamps. The density of the paint heightened by effects produced in monotype provide delicate variations. These works bear witness to research in progress, which Rob Miles is currently developing, from cutouts to perspectives. Other settings, other backstages…