'Work by Robert Levers'
Surreal scenes of security resist inattention in these images by the late artist
Reviewed by Wayne Alan Brenner, Fri., July 9, 2010
'Work by Robert Levers'
Flatbed Press, 2832 E. MLK, 477-9328
Through July 31
The artist Robert Levers, who for many years taught painting at the University of Texas, is, sadly, dead and gone. Well, he departed back in '91. But, as with all artists, there are traces of his life left behind in works, the more stately mansions built during a distinguished career, and, as with some artists, these traces – prints, drawings, and paintings – are sufficient in their composition to provide joy and provoke thought among those of us yet living.
"Sufficient" itself is insufficient to describe the effect of viewing Levers' creations, several of which are currently on display in the front lobby that welcomes you to Flatbed Press headquarters.
Your eyes may be first drawn to his pen-and-ink drawing titled Who Goes There? on the far wall: It's such a large piece, and the heavy, perfectly composed blacks resist inattention. It's an image of a group of ... what are they? Soldiers? Military scientists? Armed guards? All of them clad in uniforms and gas masks, barely discernible inside the cloud of toxicity in which they're warily standing, weapons ready. Who goes there? Is it the figures themselves whose identities are challenged, or is the question directed toward an unseen intruder, perhaps the very viewer of the artwork? The figures, masked and interchangeable, could be anyone, even imposters of a sort that would require weaponry to deal with: The shape-changing aliens from John Carpenter's The Thing, even, from a movie based on the John W. Campbell Jr. story called ... "Who Goes There?"
The closer wall of Flatbed's lobby holds three untitled ink-and-watercolor pieces, each presenting a colloquy of businessmen hovering, with skullish and partly disintegrated faces, over surreal scenes in a style reminiscent of the illustrations of Seymour Chwast, say, or Milton Glaser, but more surreal than what our Seventies-infected eyes are used to seeing from those masters. Monochrome these works are and as beautifully shaded as they are strange.
The biggest piece is beyond the display table in the lobby's center. The biggest piece is no fancy inkwork on paper, no watercolor wonderment: It's a full-color oil-on-canvas masterwork that takes up most of the large wall with its weird grouping of four men, one masked, one sitting, all rendered in painterly realism, gathered to form what the title tells us is an Honor Guard. Maybe, we could easily imagine, this is the honor guard that accompanies whoever the figures of Who Goes There? are protecting or protecting against.
Do you need an excuse to visit Flatbed World HQ and see again all the usual magnificent prints lining its long hallway – works by Julie Speed and Luis Jimenez and Bob Schneider and others? You could leverage the journey as that, but this small and elegant showing of Levers' work is, like life, for no matter who goes there, a worthy destination in itself.
