The Ugly Baby and the Beautiful Corpse: Robert Yarber's Gnostic Comedy

A young mother, surrounded by angels, gazes reverently at a balding dwarf. The setting could be one of a thousand churches in Italy, or even the first room of the Uffizzi, where the great Maestà of Giotto, Duccio, and Cimabue converse amongst themselves. Why is the Christ-child in early images of the Madonna so often grotesque? Why should Christianity’s most sacred image revolve around a creature that looks like a mistake? To pose the question is to ask about the meaning of ugliness in art. Tendentious or perverse when put to trecento altarpieces, that larger question is forced upon us willy-nilly by our first encounter with Panic Pending, the collection of recent drawings by the American artist Robert Yarber, exhibited in 2013-14 at Reflex (Galerie Alex Daniëls) in Amsterdam.* Yarber’s images are not only freakish, twisted, and deformed, but also—to anticipate a possible response to his work—trivial, cheap, brash, gauche, clownish, goofy, abject. It takes time to warm up to, say, a cross-eyed skull, its electrified gaze fixed on the Liliputian female Atlas emerging from its own nose cavity with the mystic signs of plus and minus (see figure 1), and even more to understand why such a figure should preside like God the Father over a drawing called Corpus Resurrectum Est, in which an emblematic encounter—perhaps the struggle of freedom (the trickster corpse who attempts to auto-levitate by reeling himself up with his own fishing rod) and fate (the Zoroastrian magus manipulating a robot by radio remote control)—