Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Trip the Light Fantastic
Robert Yarber is best known for his expressionistic paintings of stubby cartoon figures floating or falling through the night sky over garishly illuminated urban skylines. At once comic and poignant, they seem to suggest out-of-body-states: the ecstasy of love, the freedom of disembodied spirit, the nightmare of free fall. His current works pursue similar themes, but his technique has changed. Yarber employs digitally manipulated imagery applied by ink jet to canvas which he then paints on. While they are still paintings, their photographic basis gives them a disquietingly heightened sense of reality that propels them from the realm of dream into a strange netherworld between artifice and actuality.
With these works, Yarber has also widened his scope of references to make them more suitable to a world obsessed with alien abduction, apocalyptic prophecy and satanic ritual abuse. Yarber creates a domain where Christian allegories merge with sci-fi paranoia, and the melding of lovers' bodies is as likely to symbolize body snatching as romantic ardor.
Thus, for instance, Resurrection takes place in a cemetery at night. Light from a hidden source silhouettes three figures--a man pulled in two directions by a crimson devil and an angel with enormous outstretched wings. The Great Nearness presents a sylvan setting worthy of Winslow Homer. Here, under the brilliant midday sun, a floating woman draws a man upward above a rural pond. A number of works take place in fantastic, gilded baroque rooms. In The Two Body Problem, a pair of figures joined at the head float in a mirrored room before the pale yellow illumination of a chandelier. Music Room takes place in a Victorian parlor. The central focus is an amorphous form which may be a pair of entwined lovers glowing on a table in front of a grand piano.
Light emerges as a major player in these paintings, setting the mood and suggesting the presence of otherwise invisible forces. Sometimes the scenes are drenched in the kitschy golden radiance of a Maxfield Parrish painting. Others are illuminated by light sources that suggest the flicker of unseen candles, an eerie radioactive glow, the orange haze of mercury vapor lights or the blinding explosion of a camera flash.
With these works Yarber builds on the intriguing vocabulary he had begun to construct in his expressionistic paintings. The change of format has allowed him to expand on the essential strangeness of his vision. His waking dreams unearth the irrational undercurrents of life in our millennial age.
COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group
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