LA CIENEGA AREA

Emerging from the excesses of Neo-Expressionism, Robert Yarber is a New York-based, Texas-born painter who focuses on the decaying American dream. His film noirish , neon-lit Western landscapes are right out of “Day of the Locust”: seedy backdrops for tawdry affairs and potentially violent situations. This is the land of run-down Las Vegas hotels and tacky post-Bauhaus architecture, a breeding ground for erotic debauchery, where every sky is a purple-red sunset and the local “vegetation” is fecund with over-ripeness.

Yarber presents these repetitive scenarios in lurid, almost psychedelic colors against black backgrounds, closely resembling those velvet tourist paintings one might find in border town flea markets. His figures are rendered in the archetypal, expressionless uniformity of pre-Columbian artifacts--frozen and trance-like, yet also floating, falling or diving, as if cultural paralysis were a form of dreamy vertigo. Thus in “Release,” a man is about to fly off a hotel balcony, while his lover lies on the bed, her head buried in her hands. The TV, that symbol of meaningless informational overload, simply belches static.

The work’s main shortcomings lie in the fact that Yarber has transposed life’s melodramatic emptiness to painting itself, opting for the same sort of superficial, immediate gratification that is the hallmark of societal decadence. In reviving the figure and the Surreal “narrative” against the tide of modernist abstraction, Yarber also seems to have felt the parallel need to rejustify the drama of painting. Instead of reviving a flagging medium, however, he has simply made it baroque, and like the worst Rococo style, it is more notable for its mannerism than any real formal innovation. (Asher/Faure, 612 N. Almont Drive, to March 7.)