Robert Yarber: Return of the Repressed

Influenced by cinema, especially the denaturalized space and lighting that one finds in film noir, Yarber is forever pushing up against what is impossible versus plausible. Blind in one eye since birth, he knows he’s seeing it “wrong” but that just means that in these soft-core phantasmagorias he’s only painting what he sees. The flatness, the compression and expansion of pictorial space, and the dream-logic phenomenology of internal cohesion despite intense weirdness all contribute to creating a masterful externalization of a set of internal realities. Freud would be proud....

"Cannabis helped me release any tensions that would block the visualization process,” Yarber said. “It permitted me to enter the plane of the image, and to permeate myself within the scene. The mind-body split would be reduced or diminished, so suddenly the body was in the mind and there was a permission to explore there. There was somatic integration with the visuals as well. The colors would be enhanced. The spatial relationship would be enhanced. I’d be unburdened.”  

Yarber notes he may have come to those creative heights anyhow, but remains grateful to the “great gift the plant has given me.” 

L.A.’s Nicodim Gallery is kicking off a new series of gallery events and exhibitions it aptly calls INFLUENCES. The series explores the complex relationships between artistic creation and psychoactive substances. And its first installment is an event centered around the works of painter Robert Yarber... In a word, Yarber’s paintings couldn’t be more perfect for a gallery series exploring the influence of drugs on art. But no other gallery has gone so far as to invite the artist to curate a selection of cannabis strains for viewers of each particular work.

'I just gravitated towards the drama of gravity being overthrown. That’s just part of the drama, the fact that we’re all stuck here. And also, it had to do with the history of dream lore, my own personal experience of dreaming of levitation and flying. Later, during many openings where I would show this kind of work, people would come up and discuss their own flying dreams, and it worked into about a 50/50 break between people that flew like Superman: extending their arms and propelling themselves by their will, and people who flapped and used their locomotive motion. I happened to be one that flapped...'

“What’s returning and why was it repressed?” asks Ben Lee Ritchie Handler of Robert Yarber at the press preview for the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in over twenty years. The double entendres abound and the disarming deconstruction of the artist’s psyche takes a crystal clear focus. The loss of innocence, the loss of control, the liberation therein.

Falling figures set against illuminated cityscapes painted in acid colors. That’s what you’ll see in Yarber’s latest exhibition, which brings together paintings old and new — and which the news release touts as the kind of experience that will be like “the most meaningful conversation you’ve had while blackout drunk, the best sex you’ve almost had, and every unforgettable moment that you can’t quite remember.” I’ll take that. 

Robert Yarber‘s spellbinding nocturnal realms feel at once familiar and otherworldly. Each of his paintings is far weirder than the sum of its parts, with generic characters and unplaceable urban locales coalescing into bizarre, morbid scenarios. Yarber’s large-scale paintings appear as fantastic dreamlike visions, but the more you stare, the more his eerie febrile scenes seem like nightmares, with you, the voyeuristic viewer, plummeting into glowing streets alongside his protagonists.