Robert Wilbert at Susanne Hilberry

Realist painter Robert Wilbert is known and loved as a teacher in the Detroit art community (prior to his retirement, he taught painting at Wayne State University for 40 years). This exhibition of 36 recent oil paintings and watercolors demonstrated his skill as a maker of still lifes and portraits, his astonishing mastery of color and his thematic inclinations. Whatever genre or medium he is working in, Wilbert is concerned with meticulous observation, but also with contrasting nature and artifice. He renders his subjects faithfully, yet always presents them within carefully staged scenes, constructed environments.

Wilbert's interest in juxtaposing things that do not necessarily go together is evident in a watercolor titled Zinnias with Golden Figure (2004). A vase of fresh, blooming, deep-red zinnias stands next to an urn and another empty vase. Placed in front of the flowers is a kitschy faux-classical statue of a gown-clad female lounging on a divan. Three small balls (they look like billiard balls) are arranged on the table in the foreground. At first, the watercolor appears to be a still life concerned only with color and light, but upon longer examination questions about possible visual and narrative connections begin to percolate.

Wilbert's taste for artificiality is even more evident in Gerry with Mask and Quoits (2004), a 30-by-36-inch oil painting that achieves, in its depiction of an interrupted game, a fine balance of visual activity and stasis. A beautiful young man, wearing white gloves and dressed in a ruffled white shirt, lies sprawled on the floor in the corner of a room, an eye-mask attached to his head but not covering his face. Strewn around him are several ball-tipped darts. We do not know if he is asleep or dead or simply acting a part. Typically, Wilbert pays as much attention to the details of the scene--the stage props such as the mask and darts--as he does to the figure, creating a balance between the perceptual and the narrative. Viewers are thus invited to contemplate the fine line between what is still and what is life.

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