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. 11
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
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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, paint
The Tendencies of Burnt Sugar 2005, 51 x 68 x 27, chicken wire, foam, wood and paint
Selected Solo Exhibitions: 2006 2004 2001 1998 1996 1996 1995
Oxygen’s Shadow, Cabrillo Gallery, Cabrillo College, Soquel, CA New Kingdom, The Oakland Museum of California at City Center, Oakland, CA seeing is believing, Pond, San Francisco, CA Behind One's Eyes, 1078 Gallery, Chico, CA Lullaby, Four Walls, San Francisco, CA Between Red and Green, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, CA as above, so below, Richmond Art Center, Richmond, CA
Selected Installations: 2005 2004 2000 1999 1998
Eureka Fellowship Exhibition, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum above and beneath, Oakland Art Gallery, Oakland, CA Openings, 9-1-1 Media Arts Center, Seattle, WA What is Art for?, The Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA Fertile Waste, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, CO
Selected Group Exhibitions: 2007 2007 2005 2005 2003 2002 1998
Wall Works III, Traywick Contemporary, Berkeley, CA Watershed, Snyderman-Works Gallery, Philadelphia, PA M Theory, Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco, CA Ornament: The Art of Desire, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art Needle Art: A postmodern sewing circle, A traveling exhibition Being There: 45 Oakland Artists, The Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA 20th Anniversary Exhibition, SFMOMA Artists Gallery, San Francisco, CA 25
Robert Ortbal - untold wrinkles November 7 - December 22, 2007
JayJay Gallery 5520 Elvas Avenue Sacramento, CA 95819 Phone: 916-453-2999 Email: info@jayjayart.com 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. 26