Note: This review is slightly expanded from the print version.
Oregon artist Royal Nebeker has built an impressive international reputation. His paintings are in major collections around the globe, including the Henie/Onstad Art Center Museum in Oslo, Norway, and the National Gallery in Krakow, Poland. Close to home he shows regularly at Portland’s Augen Gallery and Seattle’s Lisa Harris Gallery. His current show at Lisa Harris is called "Staged Events: The Northern Romantic Tradition."
With such romantic show titles (others have been called "Royal Nebeker’s Journey: Dreams of Time and Distance" and "The Spiritual in Art") and with paintings titled "King’s Crossing," "Last Dance" and "Travels With Nenny," one would expect Nebeker’s paintings to be narrative, metaphysical and spiritual. And they are all of that. Yet Nebeker seldom if ever gives sufficient clues in his paintings for the viewer to ferret out the implied stories. I suspect that is purposeful. By creating theatrical images with little clue to what is going on, he creates a tantalizing sense of mystery and forces the viewer to see the visual above the narrative.
Nebeker is of Norwegian descent and he studied and worked in Oslo. He lists the Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch as a major influence, and he is commonly called a neo-expressionist, but there is little of neo-expressionist angst and horror in his work. There are hints of horror, but there is also hope and joy. He likes to distance himself from the expressionists, saying they are "very cynical, very abrasive and pessimistic."
"I think I’m really an example of good old
American optimism," Nebeker says. He acknowledges the Munch influence, but what I see
when looking at his work is not so much Munch and the German expressionists as
Richard Diebenkorn (the early, figurative work) and Edward Hopper (especially in
some of his wooden figures, his dramatic lighting and his placement of the
figure in dramatic settings), and finally – this comes as a surprise, and I
don’t know why – Walt Kuhn. So that makes him thoroughly American.
His figures all lock into the background as if walls and sky were sliced open and the figures crammed in. Everything sits firmly on the surface of the canvas, forcing the viewer to see figures and environments as shapes that interact on a flat surface. This is reinforced by his use of collage and writing. Collage elements are thrown in with no logical narrative placement. A scrap of paper with writing on it may be seen as a window or a door in an interior setting, but they serve primarily as design elements, placed mostly in corners and near edges where they serve as framing devices. He also writes (or draws words) in some of his paintings. The words tend to be enigmatic. Any relationship between these words and his narrative intent is too private to be grasped. Like the collage elements, they serve as compositional devises.
"Et Gagnez" is a painting of two women facing away from the viewer, one with monstrously huge and disjointed hips and both dressed in black. The larger figure, all in black with a wild tangle of black hair, has almost sickly purplish skin. The smaller figure wears a black skirt with a shirt the same purplish-pink as the skin of both figures. They stand on a blue floor and face a yellow wall. At the bottom left corner there is a collaged scrap of paper with the printed words "Et Gagnez." This is mirrored on the opposite corner with some scratchy marks that emulate unreadable words. To the top and slightly left of center he has written, "Asylum is uninsured." The ascending and descending letters resonate with a line representing the corner of a wall and line up critically with the edges of figures to break the format into three broad horizontal bands intersected by three less obvious vertical bands. The horizontal bands are delineated by broad swathes of color, but the vertical bands are more implied than shown and are would fall apart were it not for the placement of the letters at the top. The bottom third of the painting is further broken into another horizontal band through the use of collage and unreadable words that resonate with the hue and tone of the top band.
Similar uses of words and collage can be seen in "Kings Crossing," probably the most powerful painting in the show. As in "El Gagnez," figures are placed in a staged environment, this time a threatening urban environment. Intersecting planes create the illusion of a street, possibly a dark alley, with lettering like ripped and shredded pieces of billboards. Here too, the space is broken into broad horizontal and vertical bands. In this case they unevenly quarter the canvas, with one plane at an angle to create an illusion of depth that is abruptly brought back to the surface by a window-like box. Where the four corners intersect at odd angles are the printed letters "ENTREE IBRE" (words that are cut off). Above that the word "KINGS" creates an implied band that flows across the shoulders of two men and the bottom of the window.
In "Special Directions," the collage elements, or painted passages that look like collage, play off a triangular purple shape on one corner to energize the four corners of the painting. These collage-like areas define three of the four corners. The "triangular purple shape" on the fourth corner is actually the negative space between a man’s legs. As in Nebeker’s other paintings, the action and meaning of the figures is enigmatic. Here a man seems to be whispering some "Special Directions" to a woman. They stand in front of what is either green and black striped wallpaper or green wooden slats opening into the blackness of night. She wears what appears to be a wedding gown with a black shirt, and he is wearing – why in the world would this be so? – a football helmet.
Finally it is neither Nebeker’s strong composition nor his strangely mysterious tableaux that astounds and makes his paintings unforgettable. It is his color. He uses a lot of black. I mean a whole lot of black. And it’s not just any old black; it’s the black of marble, deep and glowing; it’s the black of the interior of a cave where no light has shone for thousands of years. Other colors, creamy yellows and lush purples, shimmer and glow against his blacks. I first saw his paintings on a computer screen, and I could not believe the colors were really so dense, rich and glowing. I thought it was due to the light coming from the screen. But it’s really there. It has to be seen.