ART : In Search of the Soul : Artist Robert Yarber’s work has a fatalistic point of view that stems from an incident early in his life--the assassination of President Kennedy. ‘I realized that the rug can always be swept out from under you,’ he says.

Artist Robert Yarber was just 15 when the harsher realities of life were thrust upon him.

Born and raised in Dallas, he went with his family on Nov. 22, 1963, to cheer the Kennedy motorcade as it passed through his hometown. Half an hour later, riding home from the parade, he heard on the car radio that the President had been shot.

“That was a pivotal event in my life because it was such a powerful demonstration of the complete unpredictability of life,” says Yarber, whose uncanny images of casino interiors, impassioned lovers and eerie landscapes suggest an untethered reality that shimmers like a mirage.

“I saw him that day. I saw the Lincoln limousine, Jackie’s pillbox hat and Kennedy’s big head of hair in the sunlight silhouetted against a huge Coca-Cola sign, and when I heard he’d been shot I realized that the rug can always be swept out from under you. Ever since then I’ve tried to be ready for that and not be shocked when it happens.”

This fatalistic point of view is central to Yarber’s work, which depicts a world on the verge of spinning out of control. This is particularly evident in his oddly disturbing images of casinos and showrooms, ostensibly elegant environments that take on a dark undercurrent when interpreted by American pleasure-brokers.

“European casinos date from the 19th Century, so they have a Victorian feeling,” the 46-year-old artist says during an interview at the Patricia Faure Gallery in Santa Monica, where his paintings are on view through July 8. “They’re beautiful and are more sedate than American casinos, which are based on the structure of a shack, and have low ceilings that stretch on forever. Dramatic shifts of darkness and light are built into these places, and the fountains never stop bubbling under lights that blaze all night long.

“Of course it’s decadent, but there’s something beautiful about the artificiality of these places--the frozen sense of time one experiences in casinos is an expression of our desire for something eternal. I’m interested in the American dilemma, and puritanism is a big part of that. We’re ambivalent about pleasure, and that’s what these paintings are about. There’s something about the behavior one sees in casinos that’s disturbingly mechanical and isn’t at all grounded in pleasure.”

Yarber began drawing when he was 6, at the inspiration of cartoons by Walt Disney and Max Fleischer.

“I was a protected child and I lived in my own fantasy world,” recalls Yarber, whose father was in real estate and built the first Holiday Inn in Dallas. “My parents loved dressing up and going to nightclubs, and though they were there for us, they were adults preoccupied with adult things.

“There was no art in the house, because my parents were into movies. My mother was an actress before she married, so I grew up obsessed by movies. When I was a teen-ager and saw [Michelangelo] Antonioni’s films for the first time, they had a huge impact on me. I toyed with the idea of going to film school but returned to painting because I felt it was more direct and sensual.

“Still, filmmakers like Douglas Sirk played a big role in shaping my work,” adds Yarber, who also mentions custom-car kingpin Ed (Big Daddy) Roth and Mad magazine as influences during his formative years. “I hated Sirk’s films when I was a kid because they seemed stilted and artificial, but seeing them again as an adult, I realized that was the source of their power. The characters in Sirk’s films seem to have no control over their lives, and that’s what I tried to convey in my work in the ‘80s. I was going for a melodramatic sense of color and space and wanted the characters to seem driven by passion to the point that they were disengaged from their fate.”

Yarber, who was a devoutly Catholic child and attended a Jesuit high school, recalls being fascinated by the images of Catholicism, which he now sees as being “highly erotic in their obsession with the body.”

“I drifted away from Catholicism when I was a teen-ager and discovered sexuality--but disturbingly enough, I think it’s starting to seep back in,” he says. “I’ve developed a great admiration for the historical construction we’ve come to know as God--centuries of thought and passion have gone into the creation of this vision. I’m also moved by the fact that man’s yearning for something transcendent has led to the idea of a soul. I’ve been trying to figure out how to make paintings about the soul but haven’t decided yet whether it’s possible to make such a picture.”

During his high school years, Yarber began taking art classes at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, where he was exposed to work by Francis Bacon and Max Beckmann. After graduating from high school in 1967, he earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1971 at Cooper Union in New York. He then moved to Baton Rouge, La., to attend graduate school at Louisiana State University, where he made paintings as well as conceptual work.

However, Yarber abandoned Conceptualism in 1974, he recalls, because “I wasn’t good at building things, I couldn’t afford to farm the work out, and ultimately I didn’t like real objects in space. The art of the late ‘60s was very anti-optical, but in the ‘70s people began to take a more positive view of imagery, and I realized then that I wanted to make things up in virtual space.”

Yarber earned his master of fine arts in 1974 and began a series of paintings depicting motels and swimming pools the following year. In 1976 he moved to Berkeley, where he completed “Apraxic Women,” his first mature body of work dealing with those themes. He spent the first half of 1977 in Los Angeles, then moved to a rough neighborhood in Oakland, where he converted a recently closed bar, the Dead End, into a studio.

“Early in my career I wanted painting to be dangerous and as wild as a drug binge,” says Yarber, who had his first L.A. exhibition at the Simon Lowinsky Gallery in 1981. “I’d work for 30 hours at a time, listen to Charlie Parker for 300 hours in a row or spend six months on a painting and destroy it. I was crazy, and though I like the work I made then, I was disabled half the time--when you burn that brightly, you have to flicker out occasionally. I’ve lost some of the edge I had then, but I’ve also become more capable.

“I’m a depressive,” he cheerfully adds, “but I wouldn’t take medication for it, because I think one can learn a great deal from it. When you’re in a state of ecstasy you feel like everything’s light as air, but when you’re depressed you’re acutely aware that you have a body. My depression comes and goes, and I don’t know why--it could just be chemical. We’re all born with this chemical cocktail inside us and anything can happen--maybe one day the fizz goes flat and suddenly you feel normal.”

In 1984 Yarber began being represented by the Ileana Sonnabend Gallery in New York, and the following year he moved back to Manhattan, where he has worked steadily for a decade.

Yarber creates images of such complexity that it is often assumed that he works from photos; in fact, he spent years pointedly avoiding photography, he explains, because “I wanted to envision everything in my paintings.”

In the mid-’80s he had a change of heart about photography, however, and he recently exhibited his photographs in New York for the third time. He describes the photographs he showed as “night views of the environments I’m interested in now--roadside stops and marginal places.”

Painting remains his driving obsession, however, and he pursues it with the fervor it has always seemed to require.

“The painters of Jackson Pollock’s generation embraced the fiction that there’s a lot at stake in a painting and that it’s a high-risk job,” Yarber says. “Today people scoff at that as a romantic idea loaded with existential glamour, but I think it’s sad we’re too sophisticated to believe in it anymore. There may be elements of ironic detachment in my work, but I want to get lost in painting--and I do.

“My early paintings were more hallucinatory and were rooted in a notion of baroque rapture. The current paintings are nocturnal landscapes that are more deadpan and are in pursuit of a quality of temporal stillness. How does an artificially lit abandoned coal foundry in Pennsylvania interact with the natural landscape? This scarred landscape is a new kind of thing on Earth, and that’s what draws me to it.

“Pennsylvania has lots of old factories and silos that are lit in strange ways at night--I find them really compelling,” says Yarber, who has been teaching at Pennsylvania State University for the past year and plans to buy a farm near there.

The shift from urban interiors and skylines to industrial landscape indicates a change in the map of Yarber’s mind. He concedes that his point of view is evolving but says that his fundamental experience of reality is not:

“A central part of the Judeo-Christian drama is the belief that trumpets could blare and everything could break apart at any moment, and I’ve been waiting for the channel to change all my life. As you get older you become more comfortable with the everyday, and my desire for some massive upheaval that would change everything has diminished a bit. But I’m still always waiting for a vision.”

* Robert Yarber, recent paintings, Patricia Faure Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 a.m.- 5:30 p.m. Ends July 8. (310) 449-1479.