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Robert Ortbal
untold wrinkles
JayJay Gallery
November 7 - December 22, 2007
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California sculptor Robert Ortbal lives and works in the Bay Area, a region known for its
innovative bioscience and technology industries. While the atmosphere here is often thick
with the will to control destiny, led by computer programmers, researchers, and scientists,
Ortbal in contrast seeks not to alter nature but as an artist address the tensions between
natural and artificial as well as rational and mystical. In probing these poles his focus has
turned to the majesty of growth, generation, and renewal as it is shaped by concrete
opposing forces apart from the import of metaphysical and ethical inquiry. In a time when
we know more than ever about the make-up of ourselves and fellow creatures, he queries
the limits of confidence. His premise: alter one aspect of nature’s cycle and it does not
cease, but what is typical about it certainly may.
Ortbal’s ponderings come to fruition in the studio, and there is plenty of play to his method.
Normal is not his vision. Nor is normal beauty what he seeks to create. With exuberant
imagination, he combines into new forms everyday materials, nearly all manmade, ranging
from chicken wire to resin, paint, plastic golf balls, and flocking. The resulting sculptures
tend to spring from the wall in energetic bursts, sprouting strange, fantastical growths:
tendrils stretch forth, elongated soft tubes curl inward, sporangia pimple the surface. This
abundant vitality Ortbal thus arrests so that his sculptures suggest specimens frozen for
taxonomic study. Despite their evocation of life from the marine to forest floor, however,
these exotics are entirely of the artist’s making.
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Previous Page: left side - Parallel Questions: Hollow and Fuzzy
Right side - into and out of
into and out of
2007, 85 x 58 x 28, mirrored mylar, foam, aqua resin, flock and paint
into and out of
2007, 85 x 58 x 28, mirrored mylar, foam, aqua resin, flock and paint
Ortbal intentionally imbues his works with a pronounced ornamental quality. The use of
decorative devices in art tends to assure viewers that art’s purpose is to please the eye and
delight the mind. Nature, likewise, offers its own baroque style in the design of species,
but never as mere decorative dalliance, always as valuable adaptation to environment.
Ortbal’s sculptures certainly declare their own sensual, tactile pull, the allure offset only by
the irregularity of his vision. In these works, we may contemplate not only the mystery of
growth’s trigger, but how ornament both complements and disguises form. The aim is not
to create fantasy eye-candy to amuse, puzzle, or repulse viewers, but instead issue the
challenge to pause and examine more closely the unexpected.
Between what the human eye finds pleasing or off-putting is a razor thin line Ortbal
exploits to subtle effect. A mere change of the light by which a work such as Hydra (2007)
is seen reveals new detail. Under diffuse conditions the great, green limbs of Hydra’s
“body” appear to have a surface as plain and matte as felt. Switch to spotlighting and this
same surface sparkles, its glinting flock-coating assuming the velvety cast of furry mosses
and lichens. The sprinkling of hand-colored Styrofoam balls in the work Topographical
Source (2005) furthers the metaphor. Their clustering, carefully arranged by the artist,
suggest the generative part of the life cycle—capsules poised to release spores into the air.
Likewise, the evocation of lichens, organisms of astonishing variety, often rococo in their
extravagance of form, color, and texture, attests to the power of permutation that inspires
Ortbal, thus the title Untold Wrinkles, a reference to countless adaptations yet to be
conceived.
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Topographical Source
2005, 43 x 45 x 15, chicken wire, foam and paint
Ortbal’s vein of exploration continues to morph. In particular, Ortbal’s Architecture of a
Scent: Cattails (2007), composed from cut foam and dissected fake flower parts, offers
wry humor. Ersatz cattails plucked from their plastic stems and secured to new pink tails
make explicit the visual conundrum in Ortbal’s use of materials. The argument is in fact
circular: mimic nature for decorative purposes with unnatural materials and achieve the
ultimate artifice that appears to be an organism. His playful use of materials subverts
representation in favor of suggestion and in the process swipes at our modern complacency
with plastic nature. Similarly, the artist addresses the stark white gallery wall. In the piece
into and out of (2007), composed from mirrored Mylar and cut foam, he transforms the
virgin surface into host for this quixotic creation. The effect is again decorative, but clearly
altering, offering wit and reflection quite literally.
Ultimately what is gained for the viewer that accepts the invitation to examine Ortbal’s
work is not the opportunity to feel diminished by all that we do not know or control but
quite the opposite, the chance to feel, no matter how altered the form or space, intimate and
engaged with physical phenomena.
Diana L. Daniels
Diana L Daniels is the assistant curator at the Crocker Art Museum.
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Hydra
2007, 33 x 52 x 25, chicken wire, aqua resin, foam, flocking, wire, paint, tool dip
Parallel Questions: Hollow and Fuzzy
2007, 46 x 40 x 16, wax, wire, cut vinyl, fabric balls and plastic balls
Architecture of a Scent: Cattails
2007, 29 x 23 x 6, cut foam and dissected fake flower parts
Medusa
2007, 33 x 25 x 14, chicken wire, foam, aqua resin, paint and flock
Imperial
2007, 60 x 57 x 9, chicken wire, aqua resin, paint and aluminum foil
pore, 2007, 9 x 10 x 1.5, aqua resin, foam and paint -Anonymous, 2007, 27 x 18 x
2.5, cut foam, mirrored mylar - opposite: Prune, 2007, chicken wire, aqua resin, paint22
The Tendencies of Burnt Sugar
2005, 51 x 68 x 27, chicken wire, foam, wood and paint
Selected Solo Exhibitions:
2006 Oxygen’s Shadow, Cabrillo Gallery, Cabrillo College, Soquel, CA
2004 New Kingdom, The Oakland Museum of California at City Center, Oakland, CA
2001 seeing is believing, Pond, San Francisco, CA
1998 Behind One's Eyes, 1078 Gallery, Chico, CA
1996 Lullaby, Four Walls, San Francisco, CA
1996 Between Red and Green, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, CA
1995 as above, so below, Richmond Art Center, Richmond, CA
Selected Installations:
2005 Eureka Fellowship Exhibition, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum
2004 above and beneath, Oakland Art Gallery, Oakland, CA
2000 Openings, 9-1-1 Media Arts Center, Seattle, WA
1999 What is Art for?, The Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA
1998 Fertile Waste, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, CO
Selected Group Exhibitions:
2007 Wall Works III, Traywick Contemporary, Berkeley, CA
2007 Watershed, Snyderman-Works Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
2005 M Theory, Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2005 Ornament: The Art of Desire, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art
2003 Needle Art: A postmodern sewing circle, A traveling exhibition
2002 Being There: 45 Oakland Artists, The Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA
1998 20th Anniversary Exhibition, SFMOMA Artists Gallery, San Francisco, CA
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Robert Ortbal - untold wrinkles
November 7 - December 22, 2007
JayJay Gallery5520 Elvas Avenue
Sacramento, CA 95819
Phone: 916-453-2999
Email: [email protected]
www.jayjayart.com
Catalog: Copyright2007 JayJay Gallery and Diana Daniels
Art: Copyright2007 Robert Ortbal
All rights reserved. No part of this catalog may be reproduced without written permission
from the gallery and the artist.
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