ROBERT MÖLLARD
Arcadian Landscapes
Solo exhibition - April 9 - May 10 2026
Dusty Deco Showroom, Carrer de les Caputxines, 11, Centre, 07003
Palma, Illes Balears, Spain
In Nicolas Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego, shepherds pause before a tomb set in an ideal landscape. Paradise contains an interruption; even here, the end is present.
Robert Möllard’s ARCADIAN LANDSCAPES begins with a substitution. He rewrites the phrase as “Et in Arcade Ego.” The tomb becomes an arcade machine. Stone gives way to play—bright, ordinary, magnetic—and the pastoral and the electrical feel like versions of the same place: worlds entered, absorbed, and then lost to time.
Arcadia and arcade are both “elsewhere.” The arcade: the looped instruction that turns pleasure into a logic of time, insert coin to continue.
In Möllard’s hands, that phrase becomes a meditation. Not nostalgia, not escapism: a human attempt to buy a little more duration; to postpone; to hold wonder in place for one more round.
What results is not a picture of paradise, but its mechanism: how it is imagined, how it vanishes, and how it persists, just out of reach, just beyond the frame.
— Roland-Philippe Kretzschmar
The Absence is Present
140 x 210 cm
Acrylic on canvas
“Many years ago, on a Mediterranean summer visit, my sister wore a t-shirt with a print which is the inspiration for this painting. She is no longer with us. I doubt I would remember this t-shirt if she was still alive. What is not in the painting is what makes it the painting it is.”
Massacre of the High-Score
210 x 160 cm
Acrylic and oilstick on canvas
“The Mediterranean arcade hall as a kid - An arcade motorcycle at full speed aiming for record time with naive and undying hope. “
Et in Arcade ego
100 x 140 cm
Acrylic and oilstick on canvas
“A dialogue with Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego, but my paradise - the coin pusher; the sounds, the light, that particular shimmer of pastime, hope, and the addictive possibility of winning.”
Eyes of Damocles
100 x 140 cm
Acrylic and oilstick on canvas
“The sword of Damocles hangs over Los Angeles. The cameras become his eyes. I’m at the Oscars, and if I meet that gaze, I must be ready for who I might become.”
Loki Receiving the Illumination of Bieber
100 x 140 cm
Acrylic and oilstick on canvas
“After the Grammys in Los Angeles, I stepped out of a black van outside The Nice Guy and was swallowed by a wall of flashes. The photographers were waiting for Bieber. I thought of myself as Loki - the shape-shifter, the trickster - arriving at exactly the wrong moment and receiving a kind of divine light.”
Eating apples (Jet, Helicopter, Rolls Royce)
140 x 180 cm
Acrylic and oilstick on canvas
“I’ve tasted something I can’t untaste, and now I crave more each experience like forbidden fruit.”
Forgive a Dreamer
100 x 140 cm
Acrylic on canvas
“A visit to Badrutt’s Palace in St. Moritz. A woman plays the harp at breakfast; beyond, a lake and a mountain. Loafers on stone floors, a cigar at the Renaissance Bar. The calm, unhurried quality feels like beauty - protecting me from the vulgar ideals of productivity.”
Success of the Flight of Icarus
100 x 140 cm
Acrylic on canvas
“Bellinis by the pool at Belmond Hotel Caruso in Ravello, terrace dinners above the bay, Mediterranean gardens. From the room’s terrace, I looked down on clouds as the hilltop glowed in the heat of sunset, thinking of the sun - and of Icarus.”
Three Musicians
160 x 180 cm
Acrylic and oilstick on canvas
“A memory of a trip with three close friends. We spent time cruising on a boat, swimming in the Mediterranean. All three are musicians, each in their own way. I’m not.
“Three Musicians” borrows its title from Picasso and Velázquez, who both made paintings under the same name.”
Fountain of the Fortunate
100 x 140 cm
Acrylic on canvas
“A wedding in Tuscany. My best friend marries my sister at a palazzo on a hilltop. Twenty-eight family members gathered for four days. There was an untroubled joy, alongside a quiet awareness of our fortune - and of time’s limits. I spent hours watching the fountain in the garden, goldfish moving through its basin, the Tuscan landscape beyond. One evening, a cat came and sat beside me at the water’s edge.”
Still Life Preceding Particle Acceleration
100 x 140 cm
Acrylic on canvas
“At CERN in Geneva, a vast machine searches for the smallest particles. On the same trip, a bouquet of flowers in my hotel stopped me. Stillness, then a quiet overwhelm. The flowers do to the mind what the machine does to matter - something, suddenly, accelerates.”
Roland-Philippe Kretzschmar
Founder
+46 708 888 598
rpk@theartbystander.com
Ellen Ingeroth
Director & Agent
+46 730 444 192
ellen@theartbystander.com