With John Robinson, no new myth arises in the classical sense of the word. No hero stands up to overcome chaos, no divine order is restored, and no story heals the fractures of time once and for all.
What appears instead is something much more fragile: a timid re-enchantment of a disenchanted world. It is as if the myth can no longer exist as a closed and sovereign system, but only as a flickering trace, an echo wandering through a hollow landscape of signs.
Within this transitional world, old figures return: Death, the Star, the Moon, the Hermit. But they no longer carry the certainties that once surrounded them. They appear as spectral remnants of cultural memory, detached from their original context, drifting through spaces of emptiness and silence. Their presence does not create clarity; it disrupts. The myth is not reconstructed but broken open, stripped of its ideological harness until only a vulnerable core of existential experience remains.
At the center of this renewed mythological space stands the figure of the Hermit. Not as a wise master who knows the way, but as a liminal being, hovering between disappearance and appearance, between culture and interiority, between life and death.
The Hermit withdraws from the oversaturated world of images and slogans, from the exhausted language of progress and identity. His solitude is not an escape, but a necessary gesture of resistance. In an era where collective meanings crumble, withdrawal becomes a spiritual act: an attempt to listen again to what still breathes beneath the ruins of culture.
And yet a disturbing question continues to echo through Robinson's universe:
Is this all we can do?
Hermits become tragic figures wandering through a world 'Ohne People', stripped of common certainty and abandoned by the stories that once held us up. "Never trust the images of the world," the works seem to whisper, "for every image is temporary, every representation is entangled in power." The stage transforms into a field of broken mirrors in which consciousness itself wavers, where we all discover that we cannot keep our story coherent. Identity shatters. Continuity dissolves. Humanity loses its grip on the stories that once ordered reality.
In that sense, Robinson's figures seem trapped in a state of existential backtracking. A movement that does not move forward, but is simultaneously directed inward and backward: toward withdrawal, toward silence, toward the dismantling of certainty.
The Hermit becomes akin to the wandering outcast, to Herzog, to Thug, displaced souls moving through the ruins of exhausted meaning. One feels in these works impressions of a post-Covid consciousness: a world marked by isolation, interrupted rituals, mourning, and the sudden vulnerability of all human structures. Death no longer appears as abstract symbolism, but as an intimate and collective wound that is silently carried beneath the surface of daily life.
Therefore, Robinson's rituals carry a strange, trembling tension within them. They resemble spiritual séances, gestures without firm belief, movements that are simultaneously empty and charged. And yet, despite everything, they bring people together; there is a sense of unity in the air, but is it sincere and reliable? It is as if the performers are slowly peeling away the hollow symbols of Western culture to rediscover a deeper inner resonance. What matters is not the restoration of a shared truth, but the experience of uncertainty itself, dwelling in a liminal state where old certainties die before new forms are even born.
Sometimes, Robinson's work suggests an iconoclastic impulse: should paintings themselves be ruined because they are merely representations of a world we must leave behind? Should images collapse so that perception itself can begin anew? The destruction of representation here is not merely nihilistic; it is preparatory, almost ritualistic, a clearing away of exhausted symbolic systems to reopen the possibility of another beginning.
This liminality reaches a particular intensity in Thangka, where a new in-between space emerges. A place where the old "Leviathan" dies: the rigid structures of power, identity, and cultural self-evidence. What remains is not a triumphant rebirth, but an open field of possible transformations. A fragile terrain where beliefs become fluid again and the individual must reinvent themselves in the face of the vastness of life and death.
Robinson's new metaphors – the mosquito, the tense head – function in the same way. They are not stable symbols within a new mythology of the ego, but symptoms of a world that has lost its fixed meanings. Yet therein lies their strength. For by refusing to conceal the emptiness and instead making it visible, they open a space of humility. Not a heroic mythology of the self, but a vulnerable existence that learns how to dwell in uncertainty.
And so the Hermit ultimately becomes the central figure of this transitional time. Not because he possesses answers, but because he has the courage to retreat into the silence between old and new worlds. He guards an inner space in which humanity, stripped of its cultural masks, is once again confronted with the elemental questions of mortality, loss, and transformation.
Perhaps this retreat is not the end of the journey. Perhaps it marks what the Tarot calls the Zero Position, the place that the Fool occupies, the archetype of potential. The figure standing at the edge of the abyss with almost nothing with him, stripped of certainty, identity, and destination. Not that triumphant hero of the classical myth, but the fragile traveler of a shattered era. The Fool steps forward without guarantees, and begins anew precisely because all previous worlds have fallen apart.
In Robinson's universe, retreat is therefore not an end, but a necessary threshold: a darkened place where meaning and existential orientation can arise in a completely different way, where the soul, after the collapse of exhausted representations, dares to begin again.