A Statement About The Work

The actual painting of my work, the “raw material”, on wall or unstretched canvas or paper or wood, involves the combination of different types of drawing and lines — a type of automatist scribble; dripped paint as another kind of line; patterns overlaid and underneath; and washes of color, both transparent and opaque. The linear elements shift between surface and deep space, binding together concepts of time and process; the “content” encompasses metaphors for both physicality and memory. The dripped lines suggest inevitability, of both forces of nature and the passage of time, while the drawn lines are paths through time and space. Working one layer of marks against the next, they are transformed through a history of process. The result is that intuition and geometry relinquish the struggle for supremacy in favor of a unified whole.

The work derives its power and energy from the tension between the continual interplay of formalist concerns and the emotional possibilities of abstraction, the moment–to–moment shifting of emphasis between the deliberate “intention” and the accidental “event”. The palette employed is both anti-naturalistic and non-psychological, not replacing nature with a subjective, emotional construct but using objectified color as merely another disruptive element of composition. Also addressed are purely retinal and perceptual propositions, as tension is provoked by oppositions: of layered imagery with flatness, kinetic energy with slow reading of subtle effects, deliberation with purely physical properties of the materials, corporeality with temporality and the nature of memory.

My intention is to describe a metaphoric territory where gesture, line, motif and color lead through a distinct, personalized language of abstraction to a more general explication of its concerns. My wall pieces bring drawing and painting into the architecture of a space. They represent an extension of my concern with removing mediating elements from the viewer’s experience of the painting itself, and also my interest in interacting with the actual architecture of a space. By making the work more immediate to the context in which it is presented, the work is produced and “lives” in the space, rather than just being shown there. Also present is a sense of the ephemeral, as the transitory physicality of the work quickly leads one from experience to experience-turned- memory.

—Nancy Olivier