“...the glosses that Yarber sometimes writes to accompany his drawings are verbal riffs. At their best, they mimic the monstrous in another mode, transposing the theme but making it more accessible. Like barkers at a freak show, their job is to be clever, to traffic in provocation, to offer us diversions. Yet by juxtaposing writing and drawing so that each interprets and illuminates the other, Yarber is conjoining two semiotic systems in a second order communicatio idiomatum, much as the images themselves combine the popular and the recon-dite, the colloquial and the abstruse, the com-mercial and the spiritual. The gloss is one degree further removed than the image from the point of origin. Thus, even as it inaugurates the work of reading, it illustrates the artist’s own predica-ment—condemned to repeat, combine, trans-pose...”
The Ugly Baby And The Beautiful Corpse: Robert Yarber’s Gnostic Comedies
By Herbert Marks
Ó 2013