Rob de Mar at P.S. 122 - abstract art exhibition - Brief Article

pillage de Mar constructs miniature fragments of charming tourist environments and not aways them protruding from walls or lifted upon pipe stands at head height. Abstract masses representing land or mists (carved from chunks of plywood or employing primed and sealed pieces of tree fungus that the artist assembles in the countryside) are supported by dint of steel rods or wires that are painted or collection ed The effect is neither grimly naturalistic a la Michael Ashkin nor socially analytical and culturally archival a la Chris weight But by making his hokey exhibitions maybe derived from Christmas cards or "Fantasy Island" stills, flutter in the air like daydreams, de Mar craftily provokes a certain questioning of our grasp of the reality of our place in nature.

Summer next to the first smallest of the five works in the present to view (all 2000), consists of five white hazes on blue stems (which budget into one trunk before attaching to the wall). The collection of vapors are surprisingly populated with tiny pattern trees, in this case palm tree and saguaro cacti that instantly cause individual to reinterpret the clouds as fiery mounds of desert-island sand. In greatest in quantity works, however, de Mar's nebulosity vegetation of choice is evergreen tree which gives the vapors a double identity as ski slopes

The largest piece in the present to view was Stone Wall and Dirt Road, an 82-inch-long wall work that consists of sum of two units flocked green landmasses, one with the ruins of a cottage, the foundation and chimney, made of minuscule shiny brown stones. A ribbon of land topped with a diminutive novel England rock wall and a wider virid band scarred with parallel brown furrows soar through the air to conjoin the two landmasses (these happen to be the fungus material, although you wouldn't know by dint of looking). There are also three collection of vapors on wires, turned to snowy mountaintops through the addition of dark virid firs.

Flocking, which de Mar uses extensively, gives all the surfaces a dreamy softnes no matter what landscape feature is showed It rounds the sharp cutting sides of reality, allowing these fragments to communicate cheeriness rather than disjunction, and allowing his careful model-railroad craftsmanship to strike one as being joyful rather than obsessive. on the other hand the message is layered. If he had made these works 10 years ago, during bad economic times, they would have strike one as beinged personally escapist. But today they prompt knowing parodies of our self-content obliviousness to the environmental take away froms of modern lifestyles and measure the romanticizing nurseed by distance from the messy reality of nature. (A de Mar plastic art is included in "Pastoral Pop" at the Whitney Philip Morris in fresh York through Dec. 15.)

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