Since my pre-teens when I started to draw and paint and became an avid cinema goer, film and art have always been closely related, each being an inspiration for the other. Images from films were often used as the basis for my paintings, and I was especially attracted to cinema’s visual aspects.

After painting and exhibiting continuously from the early 80’s onward, a small video camera that I bought around 2002 enabled me to create video art, capturing images on the streets, in museums, on trains and buses, and everywhere else I went. While living in Spain, a small video piece expanded into my full-length documentary on wine in 2008, and that was followed by half a dozen more about wine and food on the Iberian Peninsula, a practice I am now continuing in the UK.

The Art and Politics of Eating was created as structure incorporate my artwork in the same project. Still lifes with food have long been a theme of my paintings, and a previous series of paintings based on film imagery began to focus only on using movie scenes of people in restaurants, diners and bars.

Viewers have often remarked on the strong visual aspects of my documentaries, including its similarity to my paintings. Moving images mean that the visual aspects can develop in time and editing enables a contrast of images, juxtaposing, for example, changes in foliage over the course of a year, or images of a busy, urban restaurant with those a rural farm, thereby conveying part of the narrative through its imagery.

My first documentary sprung from the idea that most consumers have no idea of all that goes into making a bottle of wine, and unveiling the process that goes into producing what we eat has been an underlying theme of my work. With that in mind, in the autumn, 2016, I started an artist residency at the Michelin-starred London restaurant Pied a Terre which included the creation of a documentary examining all that is involved in the making a top quality restaurant function, looking its relationship to its suppliers.

Now, in collaboration with Gallery Different, I have installed a series of paintings at the restaurant, and the gallery has arranged a special one week exhibition to tie in with that. The Pied a Terre documentary will premiered at the gallery on June 6th with a special presentation, followed by dinner at the restaurant afterward.

Zev Robinson

2017