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From Robert Mars’ statement:

“My paintings employ layers of color, subtly collaged printed matter from the 1950’s and 1960’s, and stark, black imagery. Remote, indistinct landscapes capture the once poetic, and now nearly lost highway strips of the American past. Formerly the promise of hope and prosperity; these icons are now a sign of desperation and ruin.”

Robert Mars’ work borders on the pseudo-intellectual claptrap that passes as art in art schools. Especially with collages/montages. The use of material without representative figures as if there was something indigenous in the texture of materials that made them beautiful. But Mars avoids that trap.

There is in Mars work a sense of bleakness. Peeled paint. Abandoned gas stations. Restaurants abandoned. A landscape where the language has somehow been lost. Some of the collages almost look like road maps. Like aerial shots of the landscape. With the roads gone. It is an ‘existential’ world. (Forgive me for using the word existential. I should have used ‘camusish’. Perhaps.)

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