THE TRANSLUCENT VEIL
NATHAN OLIVEIRA’S EMANATIONS
Afigure, its features indistinct, appears in profile against an ochre background that bleeds through the form itself, making it appear like an apparition. One leg is bent at the knee, as though the figure is walking. A line appears mid-way on the right side of the color aquatint by Nathan Oliveira (1928-2010). It descends in a zigzag before stopping at about the level of the figure’s knees. It then makes a beeline to the print’s lower right corner. The line suggests a staircase, ending at the perimeter where floor meets wall.
The composition, Standing Figure (2007), a late career work (printed at Hand Graphics in Santa Fe) by Oliveira recalls French artist Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 1) (1911), but is more static. A rough red line at the base of the painting grounds the figure in space.
Oliveira’s career spanned six decades. He’s known for haunting, unsettling portraits and shadowy figurative works of humans, hawks, kestrels, and similar birds. He plied his craft across several mediums, including painting, bronze sculpture, and printmaking. And he was an innovator, expanding the possibilities for abstract figuration through a vague type of rendering, but without denying the emotional content.
Nathan Oliveira: Emanations, an exhibition that includes Oliveira’s works on paper, paintings, and sculpture, opens Friday, Jan. 21, at LewAllen Galleries. The exhibition focuses on the figure in Oliveira’s art and the versatility of his practice.
“Since he was painting at the same time and place as Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, and Elmer Bischoff, he’s been lumped into the Bay Area Figurative Movement,” says Alex Gill, LewAllen’s marketing and communications manager. “These artists were building on the threads of abstract expressionism and also trying to find ways to incorporate the human figure into their art.”
But Oliveira took his cues more from European expressionism than from the abstract expressionist movement directly. He spent a summer studying under German expressionist Max Beckmann and was influenced by the work of Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch.
“I think he felt like he was doing something different,” Gill says. “He was really exploring the relationship between figure and ground, between form and space. Alberto Giacometti was also a really big influence on him.”
Oliveira was born in Oakland, California, to a family of Portuguese immigrants. He studied printmaking at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now the California College of the Arts) in Oakland and was a summer student of Beckmann’s at Oakland’s Mills College in 1950.
The Bay Area Figurative Movement, which helped reintroduce the figure in the wake of abstract expressionism’s focus on non-objectivity, exploded in the 1950s. Oliveira’s work gained national recognition in 1959, when he was included in the seminal exhibition New Images of Man at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Curator Peter Selz, who was quoted in a press release for that exhibition, referred to the work collectively as “effigies of the disquiet man,” and he described the figures in Oliveira paintings specifically as “empty as the blank space against which they are silhouetted.” He went on to describe them as “not so much the ghosts of humans as they are merely shapes, rapid, volatile emergences brought by the whim of the artist’s brush, and bearing a deeper affinity to the soft void of his background than to the world of the viewer whose stance or shape they may casually assume.”
Oliveira reduced the figure, not to the point of obliteration but to a diaphanous, shadowy form.
Most of the work in Emanations is late-career work, with some exceptions, such as Acoma Hawk III (1975), a two-color lithograph. Like his human figures, Oliveira’s bird imagery was often silhouetted against a background so that it appears not so much to rest against but merge with. But, as in Acoma Hawk III, with its nearly black figure of a bird and red background, much of his work was dark. He favored earthy, fiery tones, over vibrant luminous color. But he was aware of how the presence of a brighter color, here and there, could ground a work and offer balance to a composition through the dynamic of contrast.
“There’s some tension,” Gill says. “There’s a drama in them that seems to convey these different emotional states. He preferred subdued colors
but also would introduce bold colors. But those were mostly in this warm range. He always used color as a tool to project these different emotional states. He’s also using brushwork to convey tone and atmosphere.”
Perhaps it was intentional that Standing Figure reflects the influence of Duchamp. Other works in the exhibition also hint, subtly, at the works of artists from throughout art history.
For instance, Revisited I (1994), a hand-colored intaglio print of an abstracted landscape, captures a similar feeling of light as in the etchings of the Dutch Masters. Even the size, 6.5 by 5.5 inches, reflects the intimate size of an etching by Rembrandt van Rijn. But the composition itself, dominated by a vague shape that could be interpreted as a ship in a harbor, recalls the work of English Romantic painter William Turner.
The work is from a series of Revisited prints, several of which are on display in Emanations. The title of the series also suggests that Oliveira was delving into the art traditions that came before, albeit not in any explicit way.
In some works, such as the oil-on-canvas Couple with Red (2003), the shape of human figures share an affinity with birds. The figures here are tapered like the sleek figures of kestrels on a wire. The arms are non-existent. The legs are together. At the right, the figure holds one leg up in a posture like that of a bird.
“His studio was in the foothills around Stanford University,” Gill says. “There were red-tailed hawks and kestrels near the studio all the time. I think they had a symbolic meaning for him. He did a series of work he called his Windhover paintings, which were images of wings, these big enveloping, almost landscape-like images.”
Oliveira held a tenured teaching position as an art professor at Stanford University for more than 30 years, retiring in 1995. In 2014, the university opened a center to house the Windhover paintings on a permanent basis. During his tenure, Oliveira took advantage of the university printmaking studio and a nearby bronze foundry.
Translating the indistinct, and often suggestive, facial characteristics of a subject from painting to sculpture was achieved in ways that appear unnerving. A series of bronze Masks from 2007 contain clear indications of noses, whereas eyes and mouths are often left vestigial. It’s as though Oliveira was depicting figures in some state of incompletion. At least they appear as such from the standpoint of the viewer. Perhaps his figures, regardless of medium, were complete in the realm in which they reside, a realm beyond the veil, and appear ill-formed because they have yet to fully reveal themselves. Or perhaps the veil, while thin at times, obscures them.
Selz seemed to grasp this spectral characteristic, writing in the catalogue for New Images of Man that “These personages travel through space which itself lacks both definition and limitation, and they appear as though they might vanish again in a moment.”
details
▼ Nathan Oliveira: Emanations ▼ LewAllen Galleries, 1613 Paseo de Peralta, 505-988-3250, lewallengalleries.com ▼ Opens 10 a.m. Friday, Jan. 21; through Feb. 19 ▼ Masks required