Oracle Dream Rot

Joe Roberts

November 15th - December 20th

GGLA is pleased to present Oracle Dream Rot, by San Francisco-based artist Joe Roberts, his third solo exhibition with the gallery. Picking up right where he left off, Roberts continues to plumb the depths of his mind and our collective unconscious, relaying dizzying meditations on themes of color, magic, memory and psychedelic experience. As the title suggests, Oracle Dream Rot, relays prophecies and hallucinatory visions, amidst a contemporary landscape of overwhelming social and moral decay–these are paintings grounded with elements of reality, yet offering the mirage of escape.

Within his latest body of work, Roberts touches on a range of classical tropes in painting from landscape to still-life, yet with the artist’s distinctive touch and sense of humor within each. Largely working at a portable scale, the artist’s ongoing series of landscape paintings are densely layered and textural, with splashes of brilliant color peaking through dark branches and from shimmering rivers. Landscape3, sees frenetic brush work and dashes of color working together to compose a scene of natural serenity, yet the intensity and amount of color that Roberts embeds in the painting’s sky hints at a sense of wonderment and the divine while also verging on apocalyptic. Within Deer, amidst a tangle of dark branches walks a young deer, its side emblazoned with a grid of scream masks–a stark reminder that despite their relatively traditional feel, nothing within the artist’s work is ever sacred or off limits.

Coming inside from the bold wilderness, are a suite of still life works that utilize a repeating formula–angular confines of a colorful room with a receding table and an ever-changing series of confounding objects laid out that force the viewer to interpret and build a narrative. Painted on a piece of scrap plywood, Warp Whistle shows a crock pot and a Pyrex measuring cup, alongside a range of chemicals and a jar labeled “Mimosa Hostilis Root Bark”, the bark of a Brazilian tree that is used to synthesize the hallucinogen DMT. Breaking this somewhat real scene is a small rendering of a carefree Snoopy, next to plastic bottles, lying on his doghouse with Woodstock on his chest, a word bubble containing a snippet of music notation emanates, carrying another form of language ripe for interpretation. And while densely colored and symbolically rich, the still lifes within Oracle Dream Rot carry a sense of calmness and quiet, depicting nighttime with dark windows and lit cityscapes in the background. There’s a sense of being up when no one else is, which unsurprisingly is often the case with the artist’s studio time, finding space and calm after his partner, toddler and newborn have all drifted off to sleep.

Breaking from the traditions of landscape and still life, Joe Roberts’ hallucinogenic paintings on panel are some of his largest to date, featuring his iconic immersive and optically confounding geometric abstractions. Composed in a series of horizontal levels, with a litany of echoing doorways, ramps, paths, archways, moats, bridges, pools, walls and receding spaces, all delineated in deeply pigmented tones from across the color wheel–Roberts’ paintings force the viewer through an unending maze with little to no place for visual or psychological rest. Sculptural additions such as low relief alien heads decorate certain outcroppings, or rotating Grateful Dead stealies share equal space with large-eyed Kokopelis or sitting Pikachus, providing a sense of pop-cultural touchstones amidst dizzying compositions. And while inherently busy, there is also a calm that is found in the artist’s psychedelic works–a sense of leisure time abounds as we allow our synapses to do circles amongst these colorful mental labyrinths.