The result is that the representation changes in archetype, the archetype in representation. On the canvas the artist re-unifies dimensions, through knowledge of history and technique he recovers the ability to communicate, to involve intransient narration, in the continuity of imagination. There exists neither a beginning nor an end, but an unceasing transformation. So the narrative path of the artist is very vast, the concepts of man's relation to the order and chaos of the universe is always present. Experiment, memory and imagination permit the artist to cross through time and develop practical analysis.

If experiment, memory and imagination doesn't flow, if the art doesn't derive from these facets, the art is base, narrow and boring. These elements excite every sort of existential reflection, which insert a plural device in de-stabilising the forces of consistency and re-elaboration. The work of art is history, it is an event the same as history. And history, experiment, memory and imagination, knowledge of pictorial techniques, are what aid the artist to make humanity rise to a present that involves past and future, a humanity that converges with events, people and things. On canvas, occurs the representation of existence, with its solutions and problems, which with direct simplicity have always been with humanity.


Oliver Whitehead's parliament explores the harmony and visual conflicts of visual language and the representation of its existence; encompassing society, events, problems, solutions and suggestions that focus on infinite classifications, between conscious order and dream, between rationalism and magic, between the fluctuating relations of transcendency and perfectly formed materiality. The artists enters into the process of meditative investigation and working dialectic, contemplates their endless vastness, and their infinite depth. The powerful images in Whitehead's major works unify, and exit from the flow of existence to tell the story that contains all the pathos of visual inquiry, experiment memory and rite.

The artist discovers territory of new and fabulous frontiers, the work of art that deals with memories, to re-trace and confront continually diverse routes, to find eternal truths, and to face unknown problems. It is against this background of interchange that Oliver Whitehead's career continues to gather momentum. Whitehead is a painter of the semi-realist tradition, a penetrating scrutiniser of images, an untiring defender of exploring through conviction and authenticity. It is obvious that he has felt the need to search for motion, expansion, continuous infinite creativity, the beauty and the ugly, the empirically given, and the ideal, the living and the dream. There is a flowing interchange between perception, the individual and the universal.

Seen in the light of creativity, the first appears to us essentially as an active fragmentation of problematic realist paradigms. The second is a further personal energising of the same and the third emerges as a universal solidification of a known enigma. To achieve this he develops highly sensitive picture-making procedures, which correspond with the activity of perception. The success of the work hinges not on representation but on making actual the findings of introspection.

This leads to a predominance of visual configurations, which are quiet unlike those generated within usually aesthetic programs of semi-abstraction. The passion with presenting sharp vision, transformation and rejuvenation of popular images, stir within the consciousness of reality and become the real subject of the works, realised through controlling a complex and resourceful pictorial language. There is, however, an unavoidable tie to subjectivity in the understanding of the work's depth.

What happens in superficial rendering is that synthesis stops short of intervening in the heterogeneous particulars leaving them virtually intact. Oliver Whitehead's works, on the other hand, are those that try both to highlight divergences or antagonisms by forcing them into the open, that is, into phenomenality, thus making arbitration possible. Such artistic figuring of antagonisms is not dissimilar from the work of making unconscious conflicts conscious, of forcing inward antagonisms out into the communicative open. In his empirical vision of depth the antagonism between remaining unconscious and becoming conscious is itself made a phenomenon of his art.

A content that remains unconscious retains its charge; it is invisible but felt. The forms and tensions that figure it remain visible but distorted by their invisible pull. What is illusory is the aesthetic objects themselves. The depth of Whitehead's art, its ability to evoke powerful successions of transience, it's generative mechanism of referential coherence, directly correlates with its ability to stretch aesthetic illusion and its underlying emotions. Whether magnified or reduced, these concepts present different, private realities.


Whitehead's approach to pictorial order is curious. His paintings must be looked at on their own terms, as he presents us with combinations that are uncommon in recent semirealist art. That is, it is seldom possible to experience one of his large works as a unified visual object. The paintings must be entered into, explored and the eye permitted to meander about in leisurely fashion. They have not one but multiple points of interest, a quality that, at times, threatens to shatter pictorial unity.

There are forms that utilise time/movement, and the spectator must experience them as diarial progressions, since the entire work is not immediately available. Whitehead's work is clearly an art of parts, tensions and relationships, a continuous challenge to its own perspective, relying on the enforced illusion of infinite representation. One of the interesting questions posed by the most recent and intricate of Whitehead's paintings seem to be; must a work of necessarily project a sense of unity and cohesiveness and raise troubling questions about the dispensability of wholeness or unity.

Out of this complex flux of variables he fashions intelligible yet convincingly figurative forms, invested with enough cognitive force to carry their consideration by the viewer beyond the realm of contemplating mere phenomena. In this way the cliché of literalness is beyond known appearances, beyond known representation, and the actions are created by a dynamic which in turn creates new forms. Consequently the constituent acts of media application ring with unfettered expressive authenticity. All the elements are given to expression gravitate towards the suggestion of volume. Line defines volume, overlaps to describe it, or flattens into shape, which implies it.

Whitehead's degree of spontaneity in the handling of tone leads to a partial confrontation with value contrasts are again inseparable from the suggestion of shape and volume which ultimately define the image. Whichever way the artist turns in his efforts to enliven his works, he is faced with a conflict of ends and means. In seeking a free expression, he is continually fettered with reference to substantial realities by the natural momentum of the medium. In face of this problem, the logic of Whitehead's identification with the status of the art object, as equivalence through motif for experience of the object world, and his willingness to abandon the motif, increasingly gains persuasiveness, with an existential versatility often compromised with the objective emotional properties of universal or collectivised iconography.


The understanding of art as art, rather than as a stimulus to associations, has much to do with the understanding of intensions. Whitehead's associations and objects recall details, part of the artist's daily surroundings that are of intrinsic interest, intensions taken out of context and explored for their potential as forms. There is a reconciliation between the eccentrics of place and specific visual circumstances with the demands of the medium as a separate entity which embraces those characteristics whilst extending into other and less predictable, certainly less descriptive, areas of abstract construction.

Whitehead does not impose unsuitable images and symbols in an unwilling painterly style, nor does he try to conform to current trends by concentrating on the absolutism of projection and its substitutes. His style and intentions do not hanker on cultural dualism, scattering anguish and prejudice, but on the quantative issue of relationships and the extended arrangement of active and passive realization. Seldom has this concept been raised in the practical orientation of critical lexicon. If practically addressed or mentioned at all, it is generally in reference to some other quality or having to do with system permutations.

This is indeed curious in an epoch given over to a scrupulous rendering of what constitutes the phenomenology of perception. Whitehead shows to the full great importance of attaining maturity before pursuing serious and advanced pictorial objectives. This means that the divergences, working process and tensions in the work could, in the hands of a less gifted performer, easily render them incoherent, the approach being delegated and marshaled by high technical proficiency, notably draughtsmanship.

All the gestural tensions, manipulations, and relationships are contained without being neutralized, although, as is often the case when a painter's method stresses drawing, the literal forms do not lend themselves to generously to compositional surprises. In fact, of course, these modes of analysis have been relied upon as points of reference and departure for describing, or conceptualising about experience. Whitehead confirms this fact in the consciousness of its implications, as he sees no answer to this - no valid form of compromise. As always the artist must hold out for new principles of evaluation and the reordering of consciousness.


The quest for self-understanding and discovery is endless for we change continually, and it is to Whitehead's immense credit that he has conducted the search with an avoidance to easy excites, and a refusal to be intimidated by the connotations of what, in shallow minds, could seem an orthodox and practically exhausted convention. His concrete experiences and their distillation have become so personal that their validity in terms of original painting can only become clearer, stronger and more communicative in approach and mood.

Whitehead's works are two-way mirrors as the forces of representation oscillate between two forms of depiction, that is, painting and drawing and both reflections when unified are deepened by a metaphysical force that is, of course, a critical examination and evaluation of self-discovery. It is no small part of Whitehead's achievements that he encourages us to re-learn this important but neglected lesson.

Dr. Michael Casey
Government of Ireland Fellow
National University of Ireland

from the catalogue Models of Perception from the
Persons and Lindell Gallery exhibition.