June 18, 2025
Nathan Oliver, Something on the Horizon, 2025. Oil on linen, 60 1⁄8 × 48 1⁄8 in (Courtesy of Karma Los Angeles)
Nathaniel Oliver: A Tension Worth Keeping Because the Drift is Always There is now open at Karma Los Angeles. The paintings in Oliver’s exhibition—portraits, landscapes, a fusion of the two—describe the events of a single day in the life of a group of people. Like the places and events depicted, these characters represent a deft combination of autobiography, community, history, and fantasy. With intentional overtones keying off Octavia Butler’s seminal voice blending ordinary life, Afrofuturism, science fiction, and alternative states of consciousness, Oliver builds a world in which everything is both familiar and a profound symbol of something more. His sublimated colors treat textiles, bodies, trees, and evening’s encroaching shadows with the same embodied looseness, in a technique that feels more gentle than it really is. His schematic gestural qualities brush up against the far-away loftiness of the characters’ inner lives, just as the scenes’ bucolic pleasures conflict with an overall atmosphere of threat. Though probably just an accident of timing, there is a further sense in which this work exists in important dialogue with the Hammer’s Noah Davis exhibition across town—both artists being interested in the specific intersection of everyday experiences and practical magic in Black life, and both merging genre traditions with stylistic innovations as they define their own voices within that continuum.
