Robert Bingaman · Night Pools

Robert Bingaman’s “Night Pools,” is a new series of large paintings of glowing swimming pools hovering in fields of blackness. In Bingaman’s “Night Pools,” familiar backyard subjects are transformed into enigmatic and richly evocative images.

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Inspired by wistfully recalled childhood memories – as a child growing up in Wichita, Kan., Bingaman longed for a pool in his own backyard – and by the artist’s ongoing reverence for the middle-American landscape, the pictures are also impelled by an ambition to forge formally distinguished and deeply meaningful art from such everyday sources.

“With some kind of impossibly dark night as their visual exposition, my pools are singled out – alone on the stage,” Bingaman said.

“Lit from within, the prototypical swimming pool – nothing more than a volume or a series of planes – serves as a stage for the thoughts, memories and desires that brought me to obsess over its image in the first place. The pools I’ve painted are honest expressions of my lack of first-hand knowledge on the subject. Instead of patient studies of water, they are simplified projections of unfeasibly plasmatic night-lights, guiding old and coddled longings.”

Bingaman, born in 1981, has a master’s of fine arts from Washington University in St. Louis, Mo. His work has appeared in numerous group exhibitions, including the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Mo., and the Red Eye Gallery in Los Angeles.