The Orlando Sentinel

Tuesday, April 20, 1999

The Warehouse Gallery

Art Gallery

VanArsdol's hard edges still pierce

By Philip E. Bishop Sentinel Correspondent
Published: April 12, 1999

'The Race of the Ghost Corvettes.' Artist Robin VanArsdol says the Corvette is a symbol of 'male contrariness.' Veteran graffiti artist Robin VanArsdol wears his bad-boy image like a badge of honor. But an hour in his gallery and studio leaves a strong impression that "R.V." is the Energizer bunny of Orlando's art world.
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VanArsdol has installed the "Corvette Exhibition" at a remodeled Warehouse Gallery, the warehouse studio alongside the railroad tracks on Orange Avenue that has been his local headquarters for 20 years.

The show's centerpiece is a 1980 red Corvette painted with one of VanArsdol's signature cartoonlike images, the 'Vette. Installed showroom-style at the Warehouse Gallery, his art car expresses his long-standing aesthetic aim, "to see art everywhere you go." The exhibition's other works -- more than 60 in all -- include paintings on canvas and paper, drawings, a collection of welded metal sculptures and an automobile hood sculpted with acetylene torch.

Nearly every work employs some variation of the 'Vette image, what VanArsdol calls the "Bad Jet Mobile," his symbol of "male contrariness." The artist explains, "Guys like to be unique, no matter how conservative we may be." When two Corvette owners meet on the road, "we know what's going on inside the other guy's head," he says. "This thing goes fast and it burns." Rough-hewn. 'Prophecy and the Screaming Man' on exhibit.

All the 'Vette works are in the rough-hewn style that VanArsdol developed as a hit-and-run street artist in the heyday of New York's street art movement during the early 1980s. Back then, young New York artists with formal training -- the most famous was Keith Haring -- were adopting the graffiti style of working-class youths who decorated subway trains. Graffiti had begun as the rebellious spray-can self-
expression of poor black and Latino youths, painting the trains that rolled through Brooklyn and the Bronx. By 1978, when VanArsdol began splitting his time between New York and Orlando, graffiti art was making the transfer to the art world of Manhattan.

VanArsdol made his mark on New York as "Bad Jet" and "R.V.," the signature or "tag" he left on thousands of graffiti murals. He thinks no one painted more walls than he did -- "I stopped counting after 5,000," he says -- during the "onslaught of street art" from 1983-'85. VanArsdol worked summers in New York as a trim carpenter and painted murals by night. "R.V." had two simple advantages: a pickup truck for mobility and drums of paint supplied at a discount by an Orlando friend.

The works in the current show illustrate the advantage and disadvantage of VanArsdol's graffiti-inspired method. In the 'Vette series, the "Bad Jet" image is repeated across a monochromatic ground on canvas or paper, much as if painted on a wall that had been whitewashed and then spray-painted. In the same way, the sculptures are roughly cut from steel plate and welded with little attention to finish. Painted in different arrangements and on different-colored backgrounds, given different titles ("The Race of the Ghost Corvettes") and decorative flourishes, the "Bad Jet" is pretty well exhausted in 60 works. The show's few painterly moments, for example an acrylic on paper called "Burning Out," in which white jets race across a rich field of green, provide a welcome respite from aggressive red, yellow and black.

Visible throughout VanArsdol's gallery studio are examples of his other signature images, all painted quickly and aggressively, all loaded with psychological and political significance. According to the artist, his "screaming man" and "nuclear mushrooms" are emblems of anguish and impending apocalypse. His "tulips" embody human frailty and "the masculine paranoia about being manly enough." VanArsdol's barracuda-like fishes, which adorn a warehouse exterior facing Orange Avenue, are about male aggressiveness and the constant fear of being eaten by a competitor. InVanArsdol's most recent work, crucifixes are affixed to seared landscapes as signs of prophetic warning.

VanArsdol has not forsaken the philosophy of the "bad painting" movement of the late 1970s, which held that naive imagery could help art regain its powers of social commentary. The movement was reacting to the obsessive control and emptiness of hard-edge minimalism. "The reaction was to be as ugly and as raw as you could be," says the artist.

The anti-war and anti-nuclear message of VanArsdol's mushroom-cloud landscapes appeals to the left-leaning art communities of Europe. " 'When you come to Europe,' " he says a colleague once told him, " 'we want your hard-nosed politics.' " He has been affiliated with a Milan gallery since 1984, when the gallery toured his work in Italy alongside his friend Paolo Buggiani's. Briefly, says VanArsdol, "I was touched by fame." In 1997 he was included in an Italian exhibition on "Keith Haring and the New York Street Artists." Last summer a one-person show traveled to Milan and Florence, as well as a resort town in northern Italy. It must have been a study in contrasts -- R.V.'s Bad Jets overlooking the sailboats on Lake Como.

Politics is still part of VanArsdol's message. The attitude is evident in a crudely painted canvas at the Warehouse Gallery titled "To the Poor: Eat Cake." It's a protest against the treatment of migrant workers painted with two collaborators whose names Van-Arsdol does not divulge because they are active locally as graffiti artists.

After 20 years in Orlando, Van-Arsdol still styles himself a provocateur on the local art scene. He still practices an "in-your-face" style of art-making that has not been softened by post-modern irony or aesthetic compromises. He still is connected to New York and Europe, maintaining an elaborate "virtual gallery" via the Internet -- at www.rvbadjet.com -- but he's also still rooted in the local scene. He is organizing a show of five long-time local artists that he calls "Phase One," a historical overview of the first phase of Orlando art.

His art may be "ugly," but R.V. is still here, he's still working, and still bad.

Upcoming Events

'The First Generation'
4/24/99 7 p.m. - 9 p.m. Exhibit You can preview works by five Central Florida sculptors at a reception at The Warehouse Gallery before this exhibit travels to Milan, Italy at the D'ars.
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