Untitled, 1979
mixed media on paper
40” x 27” uf; 46” x 32” fr
Nathan Oliveira at Stanford University Museum of Art
Art in America
October, 1995
by Peter Selz
Nathan Oliveira's exhibition, "The Windhover," consisted of paintings of catenary curves based on observation of the flight of birds. There are studies of kestrels and hawks going back to the 1970s, but the large "Windhovers" were inspired by the sight of kestrels hovering on the wind outside Oliveira's studio in the hills above Stanford. The name was supplied by the visiting Irish poet Desmond Egan, who apprehended parallels between Oliveira's paintings and Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem of the "dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon," which the Jesuit poet wrote in 1877. Oliveira compares the work of the artists he most admires--Beckmann, Redon, Munch, Goya--to the process of flight in its breaking the ties of gravity and its quest for the new and the unrevealed. He is an unreformed modernist in an age of supermannerist appropriations.
Unlike the Bay Area figure painters with whom he is often linked, Oliveira, a one-time student of Beckmann's, has adhered more closely to the European tradition. Whereas his somewhat older colleagues--park, Diebenkorn, Bischoff--returned to figuration from an Abstract-Expressionist method and enveloped the figure within an abstractly painted landscape or interior, Oliveira's mute men and women have an affinity with those of Giacometti and often assume a symbolic significance in their ambient space.
In the new paintings, the idea of flight is distilled and abstracted to communicate a romantic sense of the universal. These images suggest the curvature of the planet as much as the wingspread or trajectories of birds. They need to be large and unencumbered. The paintings in which rectangular geometric bars are contrasted to the abstract wings do not work as well, nor do the smaller pictures in the exhibition. A sense of infinite space is experienced in the most successful works. In Windhover a vast white curve, outlined in purple, is set against a night sky with the suggestion of the earth painted in dark browns and blacks below. Windhover IV, extending to a width of almost 14 feet, is a painting of brilliant light, suggesting the rays of the sun. Like most of the works in this series, it was painted over a period of three or four years, during which time the respiendent sun emerged from a large wing curve.
The "Windhovers" work so well because of the tension between image and surface. The total surface is activated by a vigorous brush which has moved and scraped over many layers of paint. Scratches, scars and furrows give each painting a unique grain, which breathes a sense of vibrancy into the image. During his long career as a painter, Oliveira has increasingly turned to a spiritual plane while remaining attached to the physical, sensual act of applying oil paint to canvas. The artist hopes to find a permanent home for this continuing series of wingspreads in New Mexico, where he spends most of his time. Ideally it would be a large room looking out at the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
Copyright Gallery Paule Anglim
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