“For a certain kind of painter, painting is a process. Of course, making a painting is necessarily a process, usually one that delivers a finished work. But for some, perhaps many painters, the finished work is less a conclusion than a question. Robert Armstrong tends to see all paintings, not just his own, in terms of the questions they pose.
Hence, his work has consistently incorporated a kind of running commentary on painting. Most obviously, perhaps, he has made works that explicitly address works made in the past, notably during the Renaissance, though not at all because they are historically distanced. Rather he is drawn to the way the painters in any era set about making the pictures they make. And he gravitates towards the residual questions lurking in apparent pictorial coherence: the gaps, the oddities, the tacit assumptions.” – Aidan Dunne.
