Tariq Oliver
Repeat a joke enough and it comes true.
Mr. Oliver is the last hand on the top of the baseball bat of modernism’s uncomfortable relationship with “Africanized” abstraction. A witty wrestling back, full of rewarding nuances and wit.
After George Condo died last year, a hole has been left in the art world. By taking Condo at face value, Mr. Oliver has successfully and playfully wrestled the blanket back. I can't look at Condo the same way anymore, after seeing Oliver's paintings.
People try to critique Oliver with his “direct” reference to Condo, but how is the same not leveled against Condo for Picasso, and Picasso to the peoples of Africa. As far as I'm concerned, Oliver is welcome to whatever he can get his hands on.
These forms by Oliver give a perfection back to the medium of painting. They feel as shocking as Condo pretends to be. That disgust I imagine I should feel in a Condo is everpresent in the new iteration in the work of Oliver. His volumetric sausaging of the forms within the faces, each face aching like un-popped knuckles. Conflicting emotions piled into opposing clusters of pure idealized form.
Depiction of people of African decent has become difficult, two memetic categories have emerged; realism and the cartoon. The American cartoon, largely an odd inheritor of racialized stereotype, has lent itself well to the task, but characterization can easily slide into reinforcement after an initial critique of racism. Realism, on the other hand, a more conservative approach, is limited and some consider problematic for it's adherence to “white values”. Oliver's work is neither, it defies this dichotomy with great humor.
They are not realistic paintings of people, but they are each a specific person, who I feel carry thoughts and tensions, but nothing is reduced to stereotype either.
Honey, there is tension once again in form.
The abstraction of the human face is possibly a tautology, as what a human face does to draw attention to the planes and curves with the areas of highlight and shadow in conjunction with the great amount of work our brains exert to understand that information is a core mechanic of abstraction.
It's why pareidolia works; we are always looking for faces. To obscure a face? To non-face? You realize I can't say “deface”, right? There was never any face to de, and that is refreshingly different.
Did you know our emotional response to faces are actually precognitive? I don't mean we are prognosticating or telepathic, or what not. I mean that we are analyzing what we see for emotional content, especially facial expressions, before the information even gets to the “visual cortex” to be processed as “being seen”. It's part of the fight/flight thingy. Whatever our mind is doing to understand faces that quickly, abstraction is key.
Starting a few decades ago, researchers found that patients who have damage to the part of the brain called the visual cortex, which processes visual information, retain a sort of sixth sense of sight. Although they are not aware of information in their visual fields, that input, whether it is a color, shape or facial expression, is still entering their eyes and being sent to and processed by other regions of their brains. One area known to receive visual information independently of the visual cortex is the amygdala, the brain's emotional control center.
Wild. They call it “blindsight” in the article.
So many artists through the centuries hide faces in their work. It's schtick most of the time. The opposite though? To take a face and make it clearly a face, but lack any face-ness, that's some blood mage magik.
Magritte got some traction in this regard with the green apple. And dare I say Mr. Oliver is pushing my buttons in a similar way. His work is not grotesque, but it feels like should be. Scowls and frowns. Shock? I can't see them. Laughter bubbling over. My mind can't make sense of them. I feel them, but I don't understand why.
It has all the parts of a face, but in it isn't one. It's geometry sitting on an Ulbald Klug “Terrazza”, waiting for the server. A knot of ambiguity. Tension and release in the undulating forms. Each one should be shown next to a Jeff Koons balloon dog, reflecting in the mirror polish forever.
They're masterful, and odd.
Earlier, at the beginning, when I said “disgust”, you shuddered no doubt. But take it as this. The disgust is in the humanity that is captured. Just as I don't want to know what broke my neighbor’s heart, of the abuse that my studio mate went through. Hell, I don't even want to hear about my own dreams and internal drama. Unaddressed sexuality and gastrointestinal discomfort. I feel the aches and confusion, excitements and joy, the interior landscape. Humanity. It’s obscene the way he lays it all out. Like Freud shows us the weight of a belly, or Richter’s weight of history, Oliver gives us the weight of an interiority, but leaves the specificity lost in the undulations of the face.
While much careful tact is taken in depicting people of African descent, that tact often gets in the way of the humanity that could be expressed. Art needs to make us feel uncomfortable, and these paintings do that, consistently.
I'm excited to see where Mr. Oliver goes.
Nicholas Cueva
2023
Mr Oliver is indeed a breathe of fresh artistic air...brush on !!!