"Henrique Oliveira has a very peculiar way of painting, one that makes him a painter. The decision as to whether what he does is painting is not up to him, in this case. And it is this peculiar way of working or his artistic process that turns what he does into a very special painting. Far from conventional.
That would justify the development of his plastic research that has wood as the material of his installations and that I dare call paintings. It is not paint, but the scraps of wood that lend color to his “paintings.” Wood scraps that carry the discoloration of time. They become paintings that do not remain on the flatness of a canvas. They are engineering works of complex pictorialness and subsequent visual precariousness. They are far from formal constructive paintings. They would be rather classified as gestural abstract art in face of the obvious unconcern about the superposition of the wood sheets. To the viewer, it looks more like a visual disarray that is characteristic of the place that inspires him and where the scraps originate from and through the artist`s creative gesture are made pictorial."
From an essay by Ricardo Resende: http://www.henriqueoliveira.com/" from P E Sharpe's post on G+.
This is what I wrote in response (posted here so I can find it more easily later on), and I expect to get either clobbered or ignored for it:
This piece that you posted (and I haven't read any of the comments yet) finally broke through my issues with what I might term academic art - art that needs an interpreter, a critic, an over-tenured reviewer, to explain it. It's painting? Oh, really, the painter might ask. But, then again, a whole academic industry has risen around modern art - we need 'explainers,' after all. We support entire faculties who 'explain' to us what 'art' is 'about.' And so on, ad infinitum. Ok, so I'm not the only one who has been at this cross roads many times.
What broke through when feeling my way into this spectacular piece was how art went into crisis with the advent of the camera, really really freaked, and still hasn't fully recovered, likely never will, things split off in so many directions after that, and critics became a necessary part of an 'art piece,' almost justifying art's very existence (when it received the stamp of official art approval that is).
But what if. What if art split into different attempts, some landscape become abstract art (essentially); others into super-realism (do what the camera does but better); and then into installation art.
This phenomenal tree is installation art - if it fills the space that the photograph suggests it does.
And what would I think if I saw this image without the fanfare of 'proper art' and the critic's beautiful poetic writing?
Oh, to be crass, I'd think 'movie set.'
And then I realized, the 'new' art, which cannot sell, really, except to a museum where there is money and space, or a wealthy private collector, where there is money space, or..... to a movie director, where there is, if not space, money.
This thought blew me away and I have not yet fully recovered.
This incredible twisted tree trunk of many metaphors would look incredible as an image in a movie.
Then the true power of the art here would find its niche, its public. It's not painting, therefore I would say, it's filmic!
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