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Olga Sinclair: Veiled Illusions

By: Carol Damian, Miami

In: Arte al Día – May 2002

Panamanian artist Olga Sinclair has used the nude as a source of inspiration in her paintings for almost twenty years. It serves as the basis for a unique stylistic method that combines drawing with pastel-like tonalities for veiled illusions of reality and as the basis for introspective exploration of the human condition.

The images are fragmented and distorted, but not lost. While the figures exhibit classic proportions, they struggle and flex their muscles and twist to escape something the artist never really reveals, and the viewer can only imagine.

At the same time, the soft tonalities contrast with slashes of color, cool geometric passages and a variety of abstract markings to set up a tension between form and space that becomes a metaphor for life’s travails and a commentary on the history of art.

Images of Apollo and the suffering slaves of the Sistine Chapel emerge from Sinclair’s paintings as she uses the nude as the basis for a pure a pictorial construction dependent on skilled drawing and chiaroscuro shadings.

Each image involves a fusion of the sensual and the geometric for decidedly contemporary results. The same effects appear when she applies her stylistic method to a description of such basic forms as might appear in still life arrangements.

A variety of shapes and textures are again described with bold lines and then given volume and substance through gradations of tones, especially grays. Both the forms of the nude and the forms of fruits and vegetables and other objects are subjected to a general law of painterly reduction complicated by distorted contours and spontaneous markings. They are transformed and illusive, yet recognizable.

As Olga Sinclair continues to explore the plastic properties of shapes and forms that range from human to geometric, she maintains the same attention to descriptive line contrasted with rich tonalities that is essential to her art. In this technique that reveals a poetic distillation of ordinary subjects into veiled images, she takes each form beyond the merely descriptive and instills it with meaning and emotion.

Art Review
	Olga Sinclair: Veiled Illusions By: Carol Damian, Miami In: Arte al Día – May 2002 Panamanian artist Olga Sinclair has used the nude as a source of inspiration in her paintings for almost twenty years. It serves as the basis for a unique stylistic method that combines drawing with pastel-like tonalities for veiled illusions of reality and as the basis for introspective exploration of the human condition. The images are fragmented and distorted, but not lost. While the figures exhibit classic proportions, they struggle and flex their muscles and twist to escape something the artist never really reveals, and the viewer can only imagine. At the same time, the soft tonalities contrast with slashes of color, cool geometric passages and a variety of abstract markings to set up a tension between form and space that becomes a metaphor for life’s travails and a commentary on the history of art. Images of Apollo and the suffering slaves of the Sistine Chapel emerge from Sinclair’s paintings as she uses the nude as the basis for a pure a pictorial construction dependent on skilled drawing and chiaroscuro shadings. Each image involves a fusion of the sensual and the geometric for decidedly contemporary results. The same effects appear when she applies her stylistic method to a description of such basic forms as might appear in still life arrangements. A variety of shapes and textures are again described with bold lines and then given volume and substance through gradations of tones, especially grays. Both the forms of the nude and the forms of fruits and vegetables and other objects are subjected to a general law of painterly reduction complicated by distorted contours and spontaneous markings. They are transformed and illusive, yet recognizable. As Olga Sinclair continues to explore the plastic properties of shapes and forms that range from human to geometric, she maintains the same attention to descriptive line contrasted with rich tonalities that is essential to her art. In this technique that reveals a poetic distillation of ordinary subjects into veiled images, she takes each form beyond the merely descriptive and instills it with meaning and emotion.
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