Bouquet

Of all the methods of deformation available to artists, anamorphosis produces the most puzzling and disorienting effects. The best known example of this technique is the skull distended across the foreground of Hans Holbein the Younger's great double portrait The French Ambassadors. So elongated is this memento mori that it looks like pantyhose stretched to the breaking point. It only becomes legible when one views the skull from an extreme angle below and off to the side of the picture, and even then its uncanny resonance owes much to the deathly grin that widens to an unnatural degree. Traditionally, creating such perspectival distortions was achieved by copying images reflected in a cylin- der or some other space-and-light-bending surface. Under these conditions the variable plasticity of mat- ter was visually homogenized and reached silly-putty consistency, allowing artists almost unlimited freedom to remodel human clay as well as all of nature for their own delight and that of patrons. James Esber doesn't use silly putty, but the toy industry has conveniently come up with alternatives that boast a vastly enhanced pigmentation and color range. From this playtime medium, and with the aid of a computer that photo-mechanically warps imagery so efficiently that one can dispense with mirrors. Esber has brought ariamorphosis to the art of appropri ation and collage. Pulling images out of a contaminated reservoir constantly replenished by the mass media he grafts details of one kind onto details of another- muscle cars and muscle men (both ready-made grotesques) and graphically pulls them in various directions until they become eerily limp. With this as his "sketch, Esber then proceeds to recreate the woozy ensemble in dabs of Sculpy II, thereby lending optical divisionism a literal plasticity that it has never had before. In the historical interchange between art and popular culture-"high and low-Esber has devised a unique formal and with its palpable softness a uniquely dis concerting "informe-vanant of low relief in high keyed colors. Text written by Curator Rob Storr for the exhibition catalog.