The decades pop
ROBERT MARS CELEBRATES AMERICAN CULTURE WITH VINTAGE TEXT AND PHOTOS
Andy Warhol is often the first name to come up in critical essays about the work of Robert Mars, the pop artist who now makes his home in Redding. Like Warhol, Mars looks at American culture through the dual lens of celebrity and consumerism. Warhol did Marilyn Monroe and Elvis. So has Mars. Warhol did Campbell Soup and Brillo pads. Mars has done Chanel perfume and Louis Vuitton fashion.
There are big differences though. Mars doesn’t deal in repetitive, isolated images. His famous faces and products are portals to paintings dense with text and photographs retrieved from old print media.
Their trajectories are different, too. Warhol moved to New York and stayed, making his name in advertizing. Mars, who grew up in New Jersey and went to the Parsons School of Design, quit New York advertising for the West Coast, where he gained notice in skateboarding, as a graphic designer.
He credits the move to his mother. “My mom said, ‘Why don’t you try and work in skateboarding?’ Which I thought was a crazy idea. She knew how much I loved it. It wasn’t a sport at the time. It was a lifestyle.”
Skateboarding is a clear marker of the most basic difference between the two. It is generational. In some ways Mars, who recently turned 50, has made himself a historian of the Warhol era. He once drove to Michigan to take delivery of 1,200 Life magazines spanning the decades from 1940 to 1970.
“I think the interest for me is I did just miss it. I had to go back and try to relive it through research,” he says. “Andy Warhol, for most of us working in pop, is our demi-god. He was more the beginning of it. He was speaking about things at the time. I’m going back and trying to understand why … Why does Marilyn Monroe have such longevity? Why does Audrey?”
Audrey Hepburn is another of the post-war movie stars Mars has often visited in his paintings and with whom he stays on a first name basis. He sees them as icons not just of their times, but ours.
Here’s the take-away Mars wants you to know about his paintings and people: “Don’t think of these as nostalgia. These icons are still very much alive.”
The supermodel Kate Moss is another favorite subject, because he believes she’s already qualified for the same immortality as Marilyn and Audrey. He thinks Lady Gaga and Beyonce are strong candidates, but is withholding judgment. Kim Kardashian doesn’t qualify.
“You can see her naked, you can see her in casual clothes. She doesn’t offer anything to culture,” he says. “Back then they (his icons) were offering something to culture. Their careers were curated. They carried this persona and it was a mystery … Kate Moss, you never hear her speak. She became the super supermodel. What you see in the end is her face. It’s the same with Marilyn. It’s about the good she brought into the world. She makes people happy.”
Mars’ point is that the kind of celebrity achieved by “influencers” on social media is shallow. With his icons, their personal tabloid dramas fall away leaving an essence that may have been manufactured, but still belongs only to them. The idea is captured in the title of a coffee table style book published in 2017 reviewing Mars’ career: “Futurelics:
the Past is Present.”
Mars has had many solo exhibits in U.S. cities and several in Europe. Since 2018, the Gilles Clement Gallery in Greenwich has had him on its roster of artists. When interviewed earlier this month, he was preparing for exhibits this May and June in Napa, Calif., and Asbury Park, N.J.
Mars did not commit fully to his own art until he moved back to New York from the West Coast a little over a decade ago. After skateboard design, he had gone to work for Adidas in Portland, Ore., specializing in apparel. The job was 9 to 5, but he was encouraged to do work of his own and the travel it required had a side benefit. Mars found inspiration in the American landscape. He did not record what he saw. The earliest paintings shown in “Futurelics” were more reimagined, showing finned cars, dented pick-ups and gaudy motor inn signs, all its own kind of iconography.
“I guess you could say it was more the low brow side of American culture,” Mars says. Next, connected with galleries, he says he “started to incorporate the high side, which was the branding of Chanel and Tiffanys and these faces of people that never really went away.”
His paintings usually are mixed media. The images of celebrities are copied and transferred. The old text and photos are an undercoating that may be sanded down and painted over. Typically they are done on “cradles” of specially treated birchwood and sealed under clear resin.
“I think one of the things important about my work is it’s all unique material; it’s papers from the era. These kind of act as a time capsule. There’s a main image and there’s a subtext,” Mars says, acknowledging his history avoids the era’s racism, wars and assassinations.
“It’s kind of my story. It’s the things I choose to look at. These are the things I feel are American; the things I would like to show the world.”
Lately, Mars has begun to incorporate quilt patterns into his work that tell an even older American story. They’ve become a new signature and his inspiration, he says “was right under his nose.” His wife, Brenda Phelps, who teaches costume technology at Western Connecticut State University, belongs to the Southern Connecticut Modern Quilt Guild.
‘IT’S KIND OF MY STORY. IT’S THE THINGS I CHOOSE TO LOOK AT. THESE ARE THE THINGS I FEEL ARE AMERICAN; THE THINGS I WOULD LIKE TO SHOW THE WORLD.’