Beyond

Four or five years ago, I began a conversation with my eighty-year-old self. For a time he guided me. Then, as the world tilted further toward oblivion, he went quiet and became harder to find.

In the studio I live with the questions he no longer answers. I find myself circling certain images, letting them return on their own terms. Stillness and movement trade places—sometimes hiding in each other—and painting slowly teaches me what lies between image and object. From idea to thing. Inward, then beyond.

From within that process, a new voice has come. Not god, not some conjured archetype—only an earnest whisper. No promises, no hope. No answers. He notices what I overlook. The quiet, the ordinary, the faint electric hum beneath it all. He points, like a child. “There,” he says. “…that.” And just as often: “Again.”

It pleases me to please him. He is the oldest thing I know.

RJB

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Haw Contemporary is pleased to present Beyond, a new body of work by Kansas–based painter Robert Bingaman. Known for his luminous, psychologically charged landscapes and still lifes, Bingaman here turns his attention to images that oscillate between the ordinary and the extraordinary, including Waffle House exteriors, Cold War communications systems, stealth aircraft, and alpine vistas. The paintings are grounded in careful observation yet infused with a searching interiority, evoking the hum of memory, the weight of history, and the fragile space between stillness and motion. In Beyond, Bingaman continues his long-standing pursuit of the sublime in contemporary life, distilling vast cultural symbols and fleeting personal moments alike into meditations on time, mortality, and perception.