COPENHAGEN.- Roberts is a polymath, a cultural magpie. His various endeavours cross-pollinate, building myths amongst themselves. Born in the USA, educated in Canada and living in Norway, Roberts works borrow from art-historical and pop cultural sources. His cramped paintings display the perspectival complexity of ancient Egyptian and Byzantine painting. The contents are stacked one above the other, showing different views simultaneously. They bring to mind Hockney's early paintings and photo collages. Cubism and comic books. The subject matter, utterly contemporary, banal and everyday is at odds with the delicacy of the medium they are made in. Watercolour on paper, over a painted pink ground which unifies the overall image and brings harmonious tonal order to the chaotic scenarios. His wide-ranging practice also encompasses sculptures roughly carved from chunks of local trees and painted, sitting somewhere between tribal objects, folk art and pop-cultural figures.
Charlie Roberts’s work takes us to a manic, obsessive mindstream of an eclectic collector of contemporary pop culture and art history. Everything is sampled and laid out without hierarchical order and judgements. Roberts uses a wide range of materials and masters a furious force as well as a sensitive subtleness. Abstract patterns, flowing colors and a primitive brutality alongside tender lines, seductive realism and psychedelic poetry. The new works have a more restrained and focused tone, both in content and execution. Every single picture or sculpture holds its own autonomous world. A magical, bizarre and bewitched place. A paradise of sins.

His newest pieces (2014) consist of pieces carved in wood and spray-painted in monochrome colours: relief wall pieces and sculptures.