Robert Loughlin Painting, Brute, Signed. A hard to find 1980's Loughlin where he had "Butched up" a found portrait painting of a blonde haired subject and added rock star sunglasses. The under portrait was produced by Kubey-Rembrandt Studios and is marked in lower left corner of the canvas. Provenance: purchased from the estate auction of the late Paul Campbell, a NYC & Toronto based photographer, antiques dealer and a personal friend of Loughlin. Verso reads: "To Ten Years After..... Robert to Pablo XOXO". Sold with the painting is a post marked invitation (to Paul Campbell's NYC Apt.) from Loughlin's solo show at Rick Gallagher's 280 Modern Gallery- April 4 1990. Also included is an invitation from a group show at the Robert Miller Gallery: Found Painting from the Collections of ... , (May 29, 1985). The show featured works by Ross Bleckner, Kenny Scharf, Philip Pearlstein, Loughlin and other New York notable artists. Robert Loughlin 1949-2011 was equal parts, great antiques picker and pure artist. He was a fixture in the New York Interior Design world for nearly 3 decades and was collected by many industry professionals and, after his death, the Carnegie Museum of Art. An exhibition of his work was presented at Art Basel Miami in 2014. Stephen Neil Greengard's 1990 Bio: Robert Loughlin is a latter-day Vandal. He defiles worn out standards and in the process creates a new art (although he would probably protest the epithet ‘artist’ precisely because he refuses to be sighted, catalogued, described, defined. He ransacks antique stores, thrift shops, flea markets, galleries, estates, and emerges with some treasure or monstrosity as proof of his visit. He will paint of anything: furniture, wood, metal, plastic, glass, textiles - nothing is sacred. And a good thing too, because paradoxically, what he destroys he improves. That is the essence of his art. Loughlin demonstrates this even on the surfaces of his own canvases - painting over paintings, applying new surfaces and partially removing them to reveal a multi-layered history. The richness of these exercises improves with time and reveal more of his basic iconography. Loughlin’s obsessions are: Modern design and freedom (not necessarily in that order.) These he wields daily. Hourly. And they are everywhere visible in his work. His figures are men, brutish to the point of pornography, but this veiled sexuality is merely a vehicle to escape the ugliness of the city. they are projections of his wildness, his ideal of freedom. They are heroic. Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. It may be the preservation of the world. Graffiti- now rather a bad word among art-thinking circles- still means, and one hopes always will mean a crude, vital drawing or inscription on stone, plaster or some other hard surface. It is a form of poetry; signals, not always liable to interpretation, of the same order as the prehistoric cave painting or the strip of papyrus. They remind us. Loughlin’s work is dark, yet luminous. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible. Stephen Neil Greengard