Chaos and order

Need to know

Aceq is located at 480 State Road 150 in Arroyo Seco. It is open daily from 5-9 p.m. For more information, call (575) 776-0900. See moliver.com for more of the artist’s works or email moliverart@gmail.com.

Aceq Restaurant

480 State Road 150
Arroyo Seco, NM 87580

Venue

Southern-born painter, mark-maker and printmaker M. Oliver is a longtime Taos artist of self-avowed roots in the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. She has work on view through May at Aceq Restaurant in the village of Arroyo Seco.

The show’s oils are large color spectaculars, some five feet square. “Earth With Fire” features bloody reds and mordant crimsons that smack you in the chest and startle you to deep breathing while perusing an incongruous pink shape in the center that might be a little heart – sort of – escaping or joining other little variously hued biomorphs hovering around a yellow rectangular substructure, all dancing in the foreground of an earthy dune, eclipsing “Lawrence of Arabia” memes.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is darkest navy “The Foundation,” exploded in the center with rounded orange-red hues, sucking your attention deep within, yet kicking your head back at the same time, getting in your face. Then you find yourself expanded, filling with the yellows of “Splendor Beaming” – pure, unmitigated basking glory.

Two more muted pieces are the large marine-lit “Roving” with painted markings mimicking graphite tracings uniting here, wriggling there and cross-hatching the emergent and receding tones of a watery depth. There’s fun and delight in light tones here, a strident note there, a background hum. A quirky kind of music tinkles and hovers in the air about “Roving.”

The smaller flesh pink and yellow “Clinging Fire” of molten interiors, sage geometrics and a cool-blue circle seem to closely resemble Oliver’s own energy signature – a robust tenderness informing an adventuresome spirit.

Her work is nonrepresentational both in content and process, though mediated through a structured approach. Oliver is currently interested in the layering of painting and drawing – “drawing with the brush,” as she calls it, “exploring how this drawing process merges with the experience of painting on the canvas” and how it speaks to her inner being of a given moment through a vocabulary of color, pictorial symbols and signs.

“I often begin with a ground, tinted or stained but no precognitive images,” she says in an artist statement. “I attempt to balance chaos and order. Content is non-narrative. I regard the canvas as an object of contemplation. It succeeds when a cohesive presence occurs. There is a practice of editing: overpainting and repainting often that contributes to the discovery of content. This dialogue is one of application and elimination before a satisfactory conclusion occurs.”

Though currently in full-fledged color, her “Taoist Series” solo show at the Harwood Museum of Art in 2002 was relatively monochromatic, a foray into pure drawing with meditative ink washes, graphite, chalk and charcoal “atolls” floating in negative space, reflecting a long-term interest in Taoism, as the exhibit title suggested.

And she continues with this focus of balancing chaos with order, the inner with the outer, the immaterial manifesting in matter, the form, line, plane and color reveling and ultimately revealing the “playful iconography” of her inner world. A playfulness is buried somewhat under an idealism of the human spirit.

“Nobility, courage and sacrifice” are watch words burned into her heart and soul, born and raised as she was on Florida’s Gulf Coast and hailing from a military family dedicated to educating fighter pilots. She was named Marcia Lee, after the great Southern General Robert E. Lee.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in art at University of Alabama in ‘62, she set out for New York and then California for a master’s degree in painting and printmaking at San José State College in 1967. She passed through Taos on her way to the West Coast. A year out of college, she would return to Taos for a Wurlitzer residency in ‘68 and finally make a room and studio of her own that she built in Des Montes in the ‘70s.

The exhibit was curated by Taoseño Jules Epstein. Upon seeing the deep, dark sage walls of Aceq’s newly constructed space, Epstein told Oliver her work was perfect for this venue, where both the art of food and the food of art are celebrated.

Aceq is located at 480 State Road 150 in Arroyo Seco. It is open daily from 5-9 p.m. For more information, call (575) 776-0900. See moliver.com for more of the artist’s works or email moliverart@gmail.com.