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Nathan Oliveira Untitled (Standing Figure no. 5), 1990 oil on canvas 96 x 84 in. “... trying to ... discover a language that dealt with the figure and also recognizing the contemporary concerns about Abstract Expressionism -- somehow trying to develop a language that embodied all of these characteristics. ... An awareness of contemporary painting language, a recognition of paint for paint’s sake, action painting, recognizing a certain obligation that I had to fulfill according to my own needs as a painter, interpreting a form of reality, somehow trying to combine all of these aspects into a language that would represent a modern figure painting.”1 Nathan Oliveira, 1978 Like David Park (catalogue nos. 17, 18), Nathan Oliveira is usually seen as a member of the so-called Bay Area figurative school, but from the beginning his paintings carried a burden of existential anxiety that separated him from other members of the group. Standing alone in an indeterminate space, the typical Oliveira figure appeared to struggle for its own existence in a vacuum. For a short period in the early 60s, Oliveira’s work approached the typical Bay Area figurative style, with a series of paintings that interlocked the figure with recognizable surroundings in closely related tones of color. This period was ended by a crisis that left him virtually unable to paint from 1963 to 1966. Since then he has produced paintings, prints and sculpture with a variety of themes and subjects, but has continued to return periodically to the isolated figure that dominated his early work. In this painting the figure appears to be turned towards the right edge, but almost everything else about it is ambiguous. Is it a man or a woman? Does it gaze to the right or turn its head to look back? Is the blue triangle at its shoulder a wing, or an arrow that points back to wherever it has come from? Is the black and brown mass just behind it a familiar dog or a menacing gargoyle? And is the dark blue vertical at the right a goal or a barrier? Oliveira supplies no direct answers to these questions, but his manner of painting suggests a mood that is less ambiguous than one might expect from this description. Despite the featureless drawing of the figure, the warm pigments and fluid brushwork give it a meaty physicality. The intense red aura that surrounds the figure’s upper body may evoke blood, but if so it seems like blood as an emblem of vivid life rather than of slaughter. The space in which the figure exists is certainly ambiguous, but hardly barren. By its red aura and blue “wing” the figure extends outward to command the space, even if that command is tenuous. Oliveira’s fleshy brushwork confirms his response to the nudes of Willem DeKooning, and it is also not surprising to learn of his sympathy for Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon. Yet it may be still more significant that he has expressed admiration for the symbolist painters Edvard Munch and Odilon Redon. A flavor of circa-1900 mysticism in his work may explain the discomfort that it has given to a number of late twentieth-century critics. But in the fragmented art world of circa-2000, mysticism seems like more of an open option for an artist than it did a quarter-century ago. And even a critic skeptical about spirituality in painting should recognize Oliveira’s accomplishment in drawing from such disparate sources to create an independent, personal and integrated painting. Timothy Riggs |