CLEVELAND, Ohio — Cincinnati-based artist Emil Robinson takes nothing for granted. He’s a first-class noticer of everything, especially miracles of light falling on surfaces in the simplest and dullest surroundings. He celebrates the magnificent mundanity of the everyday. He’s a poet of emptiness.

Robinson’s softly brushed paintings of vacant, white-walled interiors, slightly open doorways and landscapes glimpsed through bare windows, show that even the humblest surroundings can fire his imagination.

Nineteen recent paintings made by the artist, now on view through June 1 at Abattoir gallery on Cleveland’s West Side, are an object lesson in careful, painstaking looking, seeing and painting. They make it easy to imagine that Robinson, an associate professor of two-dimensional design at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning, is entranced by the kind of hard-used housing typical of town-gown neighborhoods with high rates of residential churn and the beat-up woodwork to show for it.

The settings Robinson explores look like examples of off-campus student housing just before move-in day or after move-out day. Everything is broom clean and empty but filled with a subtle suspense. Will a bird fly past an open window? Will footsteps and an approaching shadow visible through the slit at the bottom of a door announce that it’s about to open?

In the expectant silence of a Robinson painting, the eye starts to notice the glint on a battered brass doorknob, the light bouncing up across a wall from a patch of sunlight on the floor. You can almost smell the musty air of the closets or imagine the muffled street noise coming through the closed windows.

In a sense, Robinson’s interiors are a form of self-portraiture because they strongly imply his presence as a witness to the spaces he depicts. He drops hints about his role as observer by hanging a black tote bag from a nail on a wall or a door, suggesting that someone, most likely the artist, is just passing by and might be running an errand.

In a more literal way, Robinson captures the reflection of his shadowy silhouette on a door with a glass panel in a room adjacent to the one in which he’s standing. As a self-portrait, however, the shadowy image is only partial. Robinson reveals and conceals himself at the same time.

Like the utilitarian construction of the spaces he portrays, Robinson’s paintings have a simple, physical integrity. He paints on unframed panels mounted on slats of wood that edge the surface of his paintings tightly. It’s unfussy presentation that gives his work a chunky, appealing object-ness that somehow rhymes with the interiors he paints.

Obvious affinities

Born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1981, Robinson earned a bachelor of arts degree at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky in 2003 and a master of fine arts in drawing and painting at the University of Cincinnati in 2006. He is described by Abattoir as a “classically trained painter” who “spent the last year studying local spaces, ranging from abandoned university buildings to personal spaces of home and studio.”

Robinson’s work brings to mind some obvious comparisons and affinities. One untitled interior shows parallelograms of sunlight falling through an open window across a gray floor that’s made of some indeterminate material. It’s a blue-sky day outside, and the sunlight is beautiful, but the interior is spartan and anonymous.

The painting is a near-paraphrase of works by the 20th-century American realist, Edward Hopper, including “Sun in an Empty Room,” 1963, or “Rooms by the Sea,” 1951, a semi-surreal image in which sunlight pours through an open doorway on the right side of the image, with nothing but sea and sky visible outside.

Hopper, who is widely quoted as having said, “all I really want to do is paint light on the side of a house,” is a likely source of inspiration for Robinson, along with other 19th- and 20th-century painters of minimalist interiors.

That list should include the 20th-century Italian still-life painter, Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), and Vilhelm Hammershoi, (1864-1916), the Danish realist known for austere interiors and architectural compositions, including “Strandgade, Sunshine,” circa 1906, a recent acquisition of the Cleveland Museum of Art that came as part of a collection donated by Joseph and Nancy Keithley.

Robinson’s restrained palette and lush, and readily visible brush marks bring to mind the muted tones and nervous touch with which Morandi painted vases and bottles clustered on the center of a table, as if the objects were seeking collective security in an uncertain world.

Robinson’s acute interest in light and interior reflections also brings to mind Hammershoi’s fascination with the way light can reflect off a floor or a wall to illuminate surrounding surfaces.

In comparison with the other painters, though, Robinson’s interior views are often tighter and more constricted. Unlike Hopper, who was partial to oblique views that created angled views of corners with diagonal shadows, Robinson faces straight into rooms and toward doorways. It’s an approach he shares with Hammershoi. Unlike the Danish painter, however, Robinson constructs his paintings in ways that create subtle trompe l’oeil effects.

On one side of his paintings, Robinson often portrays a wall or a door parallel and close to the picture plane, as if you could reach out and touch it. Then, on the other side of the painting, a door opens, leading the viewer’s eye into an adjacent space. You know intellectually that the entire painting is a flat surface, but the contrast between the nearby surface and the deeper space next to it creates a startling illusion of depth.

Keen perception of light

For Robinson, light is everything. His work centers on the way light conveys space, form and depth as it falls across various surfaces. He’s adept at painting transitions from light to dark, especially the soft edges of shadows that occur when distance increases from the object casting them.

In an untitled horizontal composition from 2023 — the only work in the show that wasn’t painted this year — daylight filters into a nearly empty interior from a window glimpsed through a doorway on the left side of the picture. As it falls across various surfaces, the light changes color and brightness.

The wall at the center of Robinson’s painting is very slightly bluish at the base, where it picks up the tone of the sky, greener in the center, where foliage may influence the hue, and slightly peach-colored at the top, where areas of pavement close to the house might be influencing the tint. Such effects are visible everywhere, all the time. Few take notice, but Robinson does.

There’s even more going on in this one picture: The contrast between minuscule gradations of light and color on the interior walls and the bright sunlight outside suggests that the viewer’s eyes have dilated to adjust to the dim light inside. As you look at the window in the painting, however, you can almost feel the urge to squint so your eye can adjust to the brighter light outside.

Moreover, the glaring, orange-colored light entering through the window suggests the color of the smoky haze from forest fires in Canada that blew across the Great Lakes and Northeast in the summer of 2023. Robinson said in an email that that is precisely the effect he wanted to capture. And that’s exactly what he’s done.

The takeaway from all of this is that even in the emptiest of rooms, there’s a lot happening, if one takes the time to notice. Robinson’s art is a worthy reminder that noticing the seemingly minor everyday miracles of light and color that exist everywhere is a big part of being alive.

Art Review

What’s up: Paintings by Cincinnati artist Emil Robinson

Venue: Abattoir gallery.

Where: 3619 Walton Avenue, Cleveland

When: Through Saturday, June 1.

Admission: Free. Call 216-820-1260 or go to info@abattoirgallery.com