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Approaching both the built environment and the natural world with a logical, mathematical eye, Robert Agne's drawings reveal an intense engagement with, and understanding of, the near-mechanical systematization of the urban landscape. The works in Urban Perspectives--awe-inspiring in their order, repetition, and confident cleanliness--reflect the artist's electrical engineering background and early fascination with realism, and in the process, grasp upon the sense of automaton anonymity that often pervades portraits of urban life.
However, more importantly, Agne's works also speak to a profound and refreshing curiosity. Though incredibly impressive in the scale and order of the designs, these pieces harness organic forms and often impart a sense of harmony, transforming the block-like forms into exploratory tools, and the structural networks into personal, map-like documents that carry the intricacy of experience and therefore appear as luminous and buoyant as they do statically flat. In one moment, the viewer's eyes follow the smooth edges of river-like planes, and in another, right angles knock one's gaze into an overwhelming frenzy of geometric shapes. Importantly, though, the drawings do not depict rivers or houses or buildings, but rather speak to a desire to see beyond them, to explore and to figure out--quite beautifully--how the overarching system works.
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