His mature career as a painter has been marked by reclusiveness and monklike craftsmanship in his home studio. Several of his works have never been displayed outside his house. Walking into the expansive “Kermit Oliver: New Narratives, New Beginnings,” on view at Art Center Waco through December 17, feels like stepping through a portal to a more rarefied plane of reality and perception, a place where Oliver has been living on his own these past few decades, which we are only just now permitted to visit. It’s all the more disorienting to find this in Waco, a city not known for its thriving art community. Art Center Waco’s brand-new exhibition space, a down-to-the-studs renovation and a relocation from its crumbling former home at McLennan Community College, is on South Eighth Street near the Silos shopping complex. It portends a meaningful role for visual art as part of Waco’s Magnolia-driven downtown revival. Meanwhile, on Oliver’s canvases, even more farfetched scenes play out.Ī Meadow Lark Carols Saint Ceres Before the Sacred Silos (2021). Courtesy of Cody Willins/Highline Photography ![]() Many of Oliver’s paintings move Black figures, sometimes likenesses of himself or his family members, through these stations of life. Consider his striking 1997 painting Orpheus, featuring an accordion player with a wandering eye staring out at the viewer from a pitch-black background where a massive tiger pounces. ![]() The title references the hero from Greek mythology, best known for his passage through the underworld to recover his lost wife, but also famous for playing his lyre to tame wild animals-a common subject in seventeenth-century European painting. Here, Oliver has simplified that typical scene to just one animal, the tiger, who seems set on tearing into Orpheus. The musician will have to lift his instrument and play if he hopes to tame back the abyss. ![]() The musician’s gift of transient beauty is further symbolized by ripe flowers and a book of illustrations of fruit at the bottom of the frame. Often, there’s a sense in Oliver’s paintings of imminent or recent death, as in Nisan Morning (2004), which features an animal carcass hanging between theatrical curtains, or Holofernes (1983), which presents a disembodied head on a platter next to a tray of peaches.
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