Engaging Mystery and Metaphor
By Victoria Dalkey
Published Dec. 3, 2010
Sacramento Bee
Elegant, enigmatic and elusive are the words that first come to mind when describing the sculptures of Robert Ortbal, on view at Jay Jay Gallery this month. Using unconventional materials such as foam cups, dissected cat toys, Astroturf and fake rocks, Ortbal makes odd forms that sometimes suggest natural objects and others that seem to have dropped from outer space. “Surrender” is a pocked planet flocked with spray-on fuzz, sitting on the floor with a variety of wire appendages topped by flaglike forms reaching out like antennae. Is it animal, vegetable, or mineral? Does it have a function? Is it a metaphor for something else? These questions remain unanswered, but the object is oddly compelling, sitting there on the floor like an afterthought.
Similarly mysterious is “sometime around sunset,” an orange wall piece that suggests, perhaps, a range of mountains or cliffs, whose interior spaces are coated with a purple-blue fuzz that simultaneously suggests new growth and rot. It’s both mute and eloquent, an object that is incomprehensible yet somehow familiar. And so it goes as you move throughout the show.
“Oz” is an upturned fake rock affixed to the wall, sprayed inside with velvety moss-green flock. On one side, a red plastic puddle is attached with a welter of wires that suggest computer innards. It’s bizarre yet oddly beautiful. “Old Plum” is a little more gettable. It extends off the wall like a twisted bundle of twigs with bumps of new growth and a fur of mossy growth, then explodes in a series of odd blossoms made of parts from disassembled cat toys. It’s both goofy and elegant, natural without being naturalistic. The pièce de résistance is a large piece titled “Architecture of a Scent: Somewhere off the Coast of Davenport.” Here Ortbal ventures into the realm of synesthesia, giving us a visual equivalent for a sensory stimulus. Smell is the most potent reminder of past experiences. (The aroma of cinnamon, for example, can call up pleasant memories of your grandmother’s kitchen.) Here, Ortbal evokes a place with abstracted references to a cliff form blanketed, he writes in a statement accompanying the show, with “fields of tender yellow green mustard” bound by a series of extrusions that suggest barnacles. At the same time, the cup-shaped protrusions could be a three-dimensional blowup of something found on a lab specimen. This is the kind of show that will leave some people scratching their heads in confusion, but others will marvel at the way Ortbal reaches into the far realms of art-making to give us new and wholly original experiences.
Inspired by ancient peoples
A retrospective of works by Bob Leach, professor emeritus of art at Sacramento City College, at Park Fine Art reveals his longtime interest in the rock art of prehistoric peoples of the American Southwest and other places including Anatolia and Australia. “Hand Prints From Ventana Wilderness” is a richly colored and textured work on paper that haunts us with the memory of the touch of people who went long before us. “Cave Interior” portrays markings over markings left by peoples so ancient as to be unknowable to us. “Atlatls From Renegade Canyon” gives us images of a prehistoric weapon still used in Australia. “Lower Pecos Figures” is a richly rust-colored play of petroglyphs that forms a fascinating abstraction.
In addition to these, Leach offers a variety of organic abstractions based on images that arise through a process of surreal automatism, in which forms well up from the unconscious and enter into an interplay in all-over compositions of great vitality. These charcoal drawings are both sensual and lively. Full of wit and wonder, they satisfy both the senses and the mind. The show is rounded out by an intriguing group of odd and arresting sculptures in the form of the kind of carts used in “penitente” processions in New Mexico.
