Hermit: TJ Rinoski
Cob Gallery is pleased to present Hermit, the second solo presentation with the gallery by Virginia-based artist TJ Rinoski.
Rinoski’s paintings occupy the uncertain territory between memory, observation and invention. Working predominantly in oil on raw or minimally prepared canvas, he builds images through stained colour and worked surfaces, giving them the faded tactility of old photographs or half-remembered scenes. Domestic interiors, landscapes and ordinary objects recur throughout his work, removed from definitive narratives and instead charged with an atmosphere that feels at once intimate and unknowable.
For Hermit, these concerns coalesce around a character Rinoski describes as his painting alter ego. The Hermit is an elderly, hunched man who inhabits a dusty cottage beside the sea, moving slowly among weathered possessions, shifting light and the landscape beyond his windows. He exists somewhere outside ordinary time.
The character is an amalgamation of Rinoski’s two grandfathers: one a beachcomber and diver, perpetually in a bathing suit and restless to push his boat back towards open water; the other a clocksmith, whose life was defined by patience, precision and the careful repair of intricate mechanisms. Within the Hermit, these opposing temperaments - restlessness and stillness, the expansiveness of the sea and the measured interior world of the clock - collapse into a single imagined consciousness.
Rinoski imagines the Hermit as someone who has already endured the full accumulation of a life: grief, shame, regret, self-hatred, joy and stillness. Objects, rooms and landscapes become repositories for these experiences, carrying emotional histories whose particulars have begun to dissolve. A small gesture, a change in light or a glimpse of water can assume the weight of something much larger.
Time behaves strangely within this world. The clocksmith’s measured time gives way to the rhythms of tides, weather, daylight and repetition, while memory, dream and observation continually bleed into one another. The sea, a recurring presence throughout Rinoski’s work, becomes both horizon and enclosure - suggesting departure while continually returning the Hermit to the same shore.
At the centre of Hermit is painting itself. For Rinoski’s alter ego, painting is neither documentation nor escape, but a means of processing existence, as necessary as breathing. Within this suspended world, he orchestrates what Rinoski describes as “songs from colour mud”, allowing ordinary objects and quiet moments to carry the weight of entire lifetimes.
