Introduction to the Exhibition
"Latin American Art NOW": Olga Sinclair

By: James Mann
Curator Las Vegas Art Museum
Feb. 2004

 Sinclair's pictures are painted boldly out from the generous, opening shadow of art history. The basic subjects of the work here – still life, classical myth, the nude – could not be more traditional. Yet Sinclair achieves – clearly, cleanly, simply – a complete reinvigoration of these genres or motifs, and does so with fresh, innovative perspective, format and setting. The nudes exist in almost blank space, like sculpture, their backgrounds painted in the most neutral and unaggressive of tones in
the color spectrum, a light grayish green. This scheme is complicated by: first, only the flattest shaded intrusion of plane geometry,  providing anchor for the otherwise floating, untethered figures; and second, in each of the four pictures, one solitary patch of brighter color, ranging from carmine red to ochre.

 The three Slaves of course are modeled upon Michelangelo's famous, incomplete sculptures of the same subject, and the nude athlete depicted paradoxically alludes, by its impassive pose, to one of the most celebrated classical Roman marble statues, the Discobolus, or Discus Thrower.

 In the painting Bed of Bacchus, the embracing nude couple is symbolically reiterated in the passion-tinged rigidity of the rectangular solid (male), and the roundness of the cushioned gray sphere (female). 

The two still-lifes of  fruit exploit a thoroughly modern geometrical negation of depth in their hard-edged backgrounds, while the convincingly rounded fruits rest, with implausible spatial reassurance, upon absolute blackness.

 Sinclair's amazing melding of antique themes with Cubist-originated (and more recently Minimalist) flatness of field, constitutes a profoundly individual coming-to-terms with the challenge of the contemporary: to embrace yet also transcend the overwhelming weight of the past in our artistic inheritance.

On the photo: Carmen Aleman, James Mann, Brett Addington, Olga Sinclair

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