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American Abstract Expressionism, or Action Painting as critic Harold Rosenberg called it, was a style of painting which demanded that artists improvise as they worked. It was this style of painting which had taken New York by storm in the late 1940's and early 1950's and it was the style that any advanced artist on either coast had to adopt to be considered a Modernist. Willem de Kooning, who Oliviera met and befriended in 1959, liked to call himself a "slipping glimpser". Originally trained as an illustrator in Rotterdam, de Kooning became famous for his series of aggressively gestural "Women." His violent use of paint impressed Oliveira, who instantly understood some of the deep human and perceptual suggestions imbedded in de Kooning's approach.
Oliveira remembers de Kooning telling him how he had once glimpsed an attractive woman at a party. Moments later, de Kooning recounted, he looked back and found her gone. This, he told Oliveira, was something he kept in mind when painting; the visual memory of presence and absence. Oliveira's "Sitting Man with Dog" of 1957 has a strong kinship with de Kooning. The vivid black and grey swaths of paint which criss-cross this enigmatic figure seem to both give the figure mass and obliterate it.
Just ten years later, Oliveira would again deal with the theme of disappearance, and the clear style of his "Stage Paintings" showed the artist gravitating back towards a world that a viewer's eyes could recognize, albeit an empty one. In "Stage #2 with Bed" the themes of presence and absence are suggested by an open door and an empty bed. With the earnest intent of showing us that his evanescent world could be briefly focussed, Oliveira manages to give us narration, but with only a few recognizable forms. Clearly, what has happened or will happen in this world is a human drama, but the painting demands imagination from the viewer and implies that the artist and his subject have "exited", thwarting easy interpretations.
To put it another way: Oliveira's audience is part of the meditation of presence and absence. As "Stage 2 with Bed" suggests, Oliveira is aware of the audience for his art, but asks them to exit the stage door and go beyond the constraints of what they can recognize. Oliveira's friend Richard Diebenkorn was also eliminating figures around this same time, starting work on the "Ocean Park" series of abstractions which Oliveira would admire and borrow from. Diebenkorn had grown tired of the way that critics and viewers found Freudian and sexual connotations for the figures in his work, an annoyance that Oliveira shared. It seemed that putting a nude into any painting would be perceived as somehow erotic, and this was another connotation that Oliveira felt distracted from the deeper resonance he wished to create. The "sites" created by the artist during the 1970's and 80's continued to draw viewers into uncertain realms. While many of these images suggest a kind of archaeology, they appear to be made by living cultures whose inhabitants appear in separate paintings. The sites are redolent with hints of rite and ritual, and also with the suggestion of societies who built and created while remaining in concert with nature. The images thrive on suggestions of human presence, while refusing to admit details of time or place. The sites are another example of Oliveira's tendency to avoid specificity, and let the human, the abstract, and the irrational flood into perceptual empty spaces.
Often, the absences in Oliveira's art provide enthralling moments. In his mid-career works, he willed the figure to disappear, and found himself -- and his viewers -- entering into spiritual territory. |
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