Robert Overby

This exhibition of Robert Overby’s oeuvre, at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Bergamo, must certainly be praised for removing him from the dark corner.

Approaching Robert Overby’s work today is like opening a box of dusty Christmas decorations found in the loft. His story speaks of a man who spent his whole life with his nose pressed up against the window of art, although he was one of the few artists who did not join some monochord system of aesthetic thought (Minimalism, Anti-Form, Post Pop, Postmodern) and managed to maintain an air without the aid of a trademark.

For more than 20 years (from 1969 until he died in 1993), with chameleonic ease and major shifts in size Overby donned the cloak of the sculptor of liquefied domestic spaces, the painter of wide faces with a maquillage overload, the restorer of old paintings and the collage-maker of the wildest of orgies, amassing a repertoire never made inane by over-repetition. A champion of change, he rarely seems to have been drawn to materials that did not tend to change, like snakes shed their skin: the face of buildings, sexual and gender identity, light, ego, sky, clouds. Latex, rubber and plastic.

Roland Barthes wrote: “Despite having names of Greek shepherds (Polystyrene, Polyvinyl, Polyethylene), Plastic…is in essence the stuff of alchemy […] plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation; as its everyday name indicates, it is ubiquity made visible. And it is this, in fact. Which makes it a miraculous substance: a miracle is always a sudden transformation of nature. Plastic remains impregnated throughout with this wonder: it is less a thing than the trace of a movement.” This is exactly what Robert Overby never ceased to pursue. If I close my eyes and try to imagine him, I see a muscular St Bartholomew seated on a silicone cloud like an El Greco cardinal, his skin laid across his shoulders like an empty pea pod – little does it matter if the epidermis is his, that of a Los Angeles building or a shabby latex costume recently used in bondage practices. That said, this retrospective exhibition thought to amass the best of Robert Overby’s oeuvre, and strongly championed by curator Alessandro Rabottini, at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Bergamo (and other European institutions: the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva, Norway’s Bergen Kunsthall and Le Consortium in Dijon), must certainly be praised for removing him from the dark corner.

In a photograph taken about 40 years ago, Overby gazes into the lens through the frosted glass door of his studio at 4540 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles. The black and white field frames the bare image of a rather attractive young man, as solidly built as a terracotta pot and with a friendly air. He is wearing a T-shirt and a baseball cap, like any other boy just out of college. It was 1971 and, not gaining huge satisfaction from his efforts as a graphic designer despite having brought home laurels (the logotype he designed for Toyota is still in use today), he had some time previously decided to give free rein to his many extracurricular activities. Painting came as naturally to him as tying a double knot in his shoelaces but in those early 1970s he took a yearning to experiment on different scales with malleable viscous substances, very new at the time but destined to shape tastes in years to come. Like an archaeologist of another civilisation, he started making casts of anything he happened upon, pouring over a latex coating that enveloped it like a shroud: pocket handkerchiefs , socks, coat hangers, gratings, even the whole facade of a West Hollywood emporium and the kitchen filled with the smell of tobacco in his brother Paul’s house in Venice. It was as if the world were about to melt, like Dalì’s watches.

In the summer of that year, Overby succeeded in his most ambitious undertaking, turning the architecture of a rundown hotel after a fire had extinguished its voices into sombre silence inside out like a glove and recording all the signs impressed upon it by passing time. All that survives today of the ashy remains and last cinders of the Barclay House, once alive with chatter on the veranda and the smell of Saturday evening, is a batch of bumpy latex casts of doors, walls, floors and cabinets, as flaccid as a bulldog’s cheeks and as crinkled as skin turned to gooseflesh by the cold. A muddled and spectral picture of dismantled windows, as empty as eyeless sockets, and walls twisted into a distorted depth, which the gaze envelops like a climbing plant.

What Overby produced in subsequent years is a completely different kettle of fish. He simply exited through the door of Baroque Minimalism, or noir, as he called it, and entered into so-called Post Pop painting. Like passing from a barber’s shop to an opium den. From tinned chili to a mouth-watering banana split. Donning the discarded attire of the painter, Overby spent all the 1980s dipping his brush into an ethereal erotic dream, serving up an inebriated production of frothy paintings of beanpole women with a miraculous chassis, completely naked or squeezed into in tight black latex S&M gear, over which hang an inescapable weight of intimacy.

Large-format pictures full of flesh with a turbid and feathery air. Faces powdered and painted, large full lips, fragments of liqueur-like bodies filled with desire that are hard to frame in anything but a keyhole surround. An inexhaustible soda fountain of pheromones and affectation, where the sexy mise-en-scene of the come-on stretches and tears up the meaning of body in the sense of a secure place of the identity, extending it into an ambiguous and ill-defined sphere. The body – the latter Overby seems to be saying – is like a house full of draughts, with no doors or windows, and the identity is a dark skin beneath which is concealed a jungle, a threshold towards secret visions.

View of the "Robert Overby – Opere 1969-1987" exhibition at the GAMeC, Bergamo, 2014. Photo: Antonio Maniscalco. Courtesy GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo

Until 27 June 2014
Robert Overby: Opere 1969-1987
GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo

Robert Overby

This exhibition of Robert Overby’s oeuvre, at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Bergamo, must certainly be praised for removing him from the dark corner.

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