Robert Yarber at Sonnabend

Robert Yarber is best known for his expressionistic paintings of blunt cartoon figures floating or falling from one side the night sky over garishly illuminated urban skylines. At one time comic and poignant, they appear to suggest out-of-body-states: the ecstasy of be fond of the freedom of disembodied spirit, the nightmare of independent fall. His current works hunt similar themes, but his technique has changed. Yarber occupys digitally manipulated imagery applied by the agency of ink jet to canvas which he then paints upon While they are still paintings, their photographic basis gives them a disquietingly heightened faculty of perception 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 object of references to make them more suitable to a world obsess with alien abduction, apocalyptic prophecy and satanic ritual abuse. Yarber creates a domain where Christian allegories sink with sci-fi paranoia, and the melding of lovers' bodies is as likely to symbolize material part snatching as romantic ardor.

Thus, for instance, Resurrection takes place in a burying-ground at night. Light from a hidden source silhouettes three figures--a man shakeed in two directions by a crimson devil and an angel with enormous outstretched wings. The Great Nearness not aways a sylvan setting worthy of Winslow Homer Here, beneath 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 ranges In The Two Body enigma a pair of figures joined at the head float in a mirrored expanse before the pale yellow illumination of a chandelier. Music field takes place in a Victorian parlor. The central focus is an amorphous form which may be a pair of entwined lover glowing upon a table in front of a grand piano.

Light rise s as a major player in these paintings, setting the vein and suggesting the presence of otherwise invisible forces. Sometimes the sights are drenched in the kitschy of gold radiance of a Maxfield Parrish painting. Others are illuminated by the agency of light sources that suggest the flicker of undiscovered candles, an eerie radioactive be incandescent the orange haze of hermes vapor lights or the blinding explosion of a camera flash.

With these works Yarber builds upon the intriguing vocabulary he had begun to raise in his expressionistic paintings. The change of format has allowed him to expand upon the essential strangeness of his vision. His waking dreams unearth the irrational undercurrent of life in our millennial age.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group