For Rob Bibler, the surreal possibilities presented by cinema mesh fantastically with a contemporary reading of Renaissance influences.

––Danielle Knapp, McCosh Curator, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, 
Visual Magic: An Oregon Invitational exhibition catalogue, 2019, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art

For more than 40 years, Robert Bibler (American, 1948) has combined a fascination with cinematic storytelling, classic film, and Renaissance art to create a beautifully rendered and thoughtful body of work.  A master draftsman, Bibler embraces figurative representation and symbolism in surreal, narrative works that distort space and time.  This exhibition of Bibler’s work has been organized by Collection Curator Jonathan Bucci, and features drawings and mixed media pieces on paper created between 1974 and 2017….  Bibler has exhibited extensively in the Pacific Northwest and his work is included in public and private collections throughout the region, including the Hallie Ford Museum of Art.  He earned his BFA degree from the University of Washington and his MFA degree from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

–– John Olbrantz, Maribeth Collins Director of the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Robert Bibler: Works on Paper, a retrospective exhibition, 2018

Throughout his career, Robert Bibler (b. 1948) has embraced figurative representation and symbolism in his surreal, narrative works that distort space and time… . The figure features prominently in Bibler’s art, often taking on the role of protagonist in an open-ended narrative imbued with mystery, foreboding, strength, humor and beauty. Many of the artworks feature invented scenes and shifting spatial perspectives combined with studied renderings of emblematic poses and symbolic objects such as ropes, hooks, water, and glass. Bibler also uses art historical and architectural references to covey an enigmatic sense of time and place.

–– Jonathan Bucci, Collection Curator, Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Robert Bibler: Works on Paper, a retrospective exhibition, 2018

The “Works on Paper” exhibit fills only two rooms, but a full examination of Bibler’s work will take some time.  The pieces are multi-dimensional, drawing the viewer in: the artist’s layered use of media underscores layers of meaning.  In a single piece, Bibler may use pen and ink, watercolor, Conti crayon, oil, colored pencil or collage.  Images are place atop of one another; looking through glass we see a palimpsest of views and figures: classical drawings, images glued upon images, snippets from old films.  The viewer can spend a long time looking at a single piece and still find surprises.  Glass is a recurring motif in Bibler’s work: layered, reflective, transparent, clouded; bottles and stoppers distort what lies beyond or underneath, a grid of greenhouse glass encloses a world, or is placed as a frame between the viewer and the scene beyond.

I was especially taken with his meticulous interpretation of Renaissance red-chalk drawings; as homage to Michelangelo and DaVinci, Bibler “quotes” from these classic drawings in many of his works, angling and turning portions of the masters’ sketches to serve as background and support of his own vision.  Many of his pieces seem almost to mourn the passing of classical art:  I was particularly taken with one painting, “The Submersion,” in which a modern figure gazes into a pool at a submerged Corinthian capital while a hook and tackle seems ready to rescue the marble column from sinking.

Bibler is a superb draftsman; it is a joy to view modern representational works executed with such mastery of technique.  In a more modern twist, this classic technique is put to use in the service of symbolism in surreal, dream-like narratives that transcend space and time….

–– Laura Sauter, “Local Artist Robert Bibler: Works on Paper,” Salem Weekly, May 24-June 6, 2018

In Robert Bibler's (Salem) classically executed pieces, the drawing process itself constitutes the subject-matter.  These works represent the artist's world in its multiple phases and with its many tools:  hand, pencil, compass, paper, still life elements; crumpled drawings, drawings in progress, completed studies; and references to classic artists of the past such as the Florentine Andrea del Sarto.  The artist plays illusionistic tricks:  his hand and pencil extend out of the picture plane. One of the drawings within the drawing starts out as a rough sketch and insensibly develops into a full-fledged landscape following the rules of perspective.  Bibler simultaneously emphasizes the flatness of the paper surface and creates an illusion of depth.  With exquisite craftsmanship, he sets out to represent various formal means of representation:  mark-making, a delicately phrased line, cross-hatching, continuous shading to render light and model form.  In a display of skill, he recreates the texture of skin, shells, plants; the sheen of metal and reflections on glass.

–– Sylvie Pederson, “Art of Drawing, an exhibition at the Jacobs Gallery,” Eugene Weekly, March 24, 2005

As an exhibition title, Thinking Through Drawing, at Blackfish Gallery, may be a statement of the obvious for artists, but for viewers, the distinctly different manifestations of the process by Paul Missal, primarily a painter, and Robert Bibler, for whom finished drawings are his main production, were enlightening….  Bibler’s fully realized “presentation” drawings showed the influence of a recent stay in Italy.  Terra-cotta Conté and oil washes lend an antiquity to images Leonardo would have relished.  Typical of the pencil drawings, Still Life with Ginkgo includes references to nature, art history, and metaphysics.  Bibler features the artist––himself––not only through the hand that holds a pencil, but also in the postcards, two collaged and the other meticulously simulated in pencil.  The Revelation #2, a large mixed media piece with a terra-cotta oil glaze, places classical subjects in a post-modern context: it depicts a voluptuous reclining clay torso that fills the picture plane; the torso is an empty shell, however, broken open at the shoulder and partly concealed by the draperies, while in the lower left corner, a “live” arm encompasses a sculpted, white classical head, its hand covering the eyes of the sculpture.  Visually rich, the picture resonates with unlikely juxtapositions, omissions, and ambiguous signifiers.

–– Lois Allan, “Robert Bibler and Paul Missal at Blackfish Gallery,” Art Week, February, 1996

Robert Bibler employs classical techniques and allusions to articulate some telling aspects of the modern psyche.  Immersion/Reflection #3 encompasses a web of tangled references which give rise to conflicting feelings of frustration, desire, solitude, and angst; his technical interplay of loose washes and sharp rendering creates an ambiguous and yet almost penetrable space which seems to circle back on itself like a tiger chasing its tail.  Mr. Bibler manages to touch on some points at which our personal experience fades into that larger story we call myth; he expresses his ideas as personal necessities, allowing us to share his feelings as they relate to our own.

–– Matt Ferranto, “Blackfish Artists at Renshaw Gallery,” artsoregon, vol. 1, #2, October, 1993

…A number of symbolically loaded images recur in Bibler’s work.  A bird’s nest suggests the act of gathering things from all over to create a home.  A branch of a plant left in a glass to sprout alludes to new growth from old.  The distortions seen through a glass brick embody the difference between glass as a plane and as a volume.

All things in Bibler’s work can have several meanings.

However, his most important symbol is the constantly recurring window.  Framed by riveted metal, it could be from a ship, but it also could symbolize the powerful division between safety and danger, outside and inside, here and there, now and then, reality and illusion.

The act of looking through Bibler’s windows makes us voyeurs and forces us to reveal in the distance between desire and satisfaction.  Yet, he also disrupt this relationship by blurring the borders, of not only his windows, but of every symbol in his paintings.  All things overlap and converge.  The distinction between dreams, memory images and reality – between the layers of our perception of the world – is ambiguous.  Bibler’s point seems to be that any separation at all is arbitrary….

–– Randy Gragg, “Mixing Up a Feast of Allegorical Stew: Robert Bibler at Blackfish Gallery,” review, The Oregonian, April 20, 1990

In their concurrent solo exhibitions at the University of Oregon Museum of Art [Three Young Artists: Robert Bibler, Phyllis Richardson, Nick de Matties], each of the three young Northwest artists takes risks in ideas, techniques and presentations….

Robert Bibler’s twelve drawings have the quality of dreams –– but are dreams born of a striking romantic imagination.  His drawings irresistibly evoke the romanticism of Henri Rousseau and at the same time the austerity of George Tooker.  Present is the romantic quality found in Rousseau’s The Dream, 1910, with figures juxtaposed in a dream setting, but further comparison is tenuous.  Bibler brings together incongruous space, structures and people in a setting that suggests the austere feeling associated with people contained in Tooker’s cubicles in Landscape With Figures.

In surrealist time and space Bibler’s Southern Hemisphere juxtaposes a trompe l’oeil aging gentleman –– who easily reminds me of Sigmund Freud contemplating some psychoanalytical mystery –– with a distant clouded sky and foreground conservatory.  The setting is illuminated by a chilling full moon.  The gentlemanly male figure stands smoking a cigar alongside a cage-like conservatory filled with vegetation.

Similar incongruities exist in Conservatory III, but in this drawing the aging male figure is unknowingly trapped within the cage-like structure.  He sits staring endlessly from within the conservatory –– irrespective of a reclining female figure sleeping at his side and partially obscured by a cloud formation.  Bibler’s subjective experience, though romantic, has an ominous portent of the unknown.  Throughout there is a disquieting psychic significance with obvious parallels to contemporary life.

–– Mike E. Walsh, “Bibler, de Matties, Richardson: Taking Risks,”Art Week, February 21, 1976