"Kermit Oliver: Tracing Our Pilgrimage" The man's face looks aged and weathered. Accordionist is the last vocation you would pick for him, since his wrinkled hands relay the same signs of aging; still, he holds the instrument expertly, fingers lingering over keys the way a lover's graze soft flesh. However nimble and confident his fingers may be, it is his face that catches the eye. He wears an expression of fear, and it's not hard to see why: Behind him, a tiger's body is caught in mid-pounce. His left paw is raised, his claws, unsheathed. The success of Orpheus, a painting by Kermit Oliver, is its realism, created by the expert application of acrylic oil to canvas. The acrylic oil is applied in short downward strokes, creating vertical lines that imply movement. Acrylic oil is also put on in layers, one on top of the other, making the picture look wet. Because liquids are known for their fluidity, this technique also gives the painting kinetic movement. This is what makes the man look so tight, the tiger so taut, as if he (or she) may in fact bypass Orpheus altogether and jump out of the painting toward you. "Kermit Oliver: Tracing Our Pilgrimage" is an exhibition of 17 paintings — including Orpheus — taking up Art League Houston's front and hallway galleries. The works on display span 30 of his 40 years as a painter. Dido and Aeneas (1997) is split vertically into halves, with the left side portraying a black and bleak funeral procession. Not one to divert from the African-American lineage present in most of his paintings, Oliver paints the originally Carthaginian Dido as a black woman with long dreadlocks accessorized with golden beads. Her face has a ghostly pallor. Oliver's talent with oils is evident here also; whereas in Orpheus he made the oils wet, here he takes a wet substance and makes it look dry, like powder. Oliver is a native Texan and Texas Southern University graduate who, until a month ago, quietly sorted mail in a Waco post office. However, his Texas roots were not enough to inspire the famously reclusive painter to come to his own opening Friday evening. (Ironically, this elusiveness doesn't stop Oliver from designing a scarf every year for one of the world's most coveted couture brands, Hermès. Fancy, huh?) Despite this, Art League Houston not only exhibits Oliver, but honors him with its 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award — hermit factor notwithstanding. Through November 15. 1953 Montrose, 713-523-9530. — AO
"Nice. Luc Tuymans" With "Nice. Luc Tuymans," the painter of the same name uses his enduring style — realism — in portraiture. Tuymans has been painting portraits of himself, family members and public figures since the start of his career in the 1970s, but these are no ordinary faces. With the famous figures particularly, Tuymans uses his oils to re-examine feelings about these people. He muddies greens into colors of puce and washes out blacks into gray-scale hues, the combination of which leaves an ambivalent or even negative feeling about the person being portrayed. The Heritage VI (1996) takes a photograph of late white supremacist Joseph Milteer, whose name was tossed around in connection the JFK assassination, and turns it into a black-and-gray portrait adding Tuymans's signature ghoulish green tint to the oil-on-canvas remake of the original black-and-white photograph. He does the same with a picture of Condoleezza Rice (The Secretary of State 2005), his blurry oils turning her signature scowl into a mush-mouthed, mismatched miasma of drab colors. Brown oil pools into the corners of her squinted eyes, and her notable red lips are painted in a burnished burgundy shade. Milteer's portrait provides a wide politician's smile in comparison to Rice's, whose lips are slightly parted, barely letting through her other notable feature, her gap. Iphone (2008) is a self-portrait of Tuymans, drawn to turn him into a smudge, made so by the flash of the camera. Thus, he is nothing more than an outline of a man in a hat. As with a person you pass on the street, his facial features are not visible. With his ease at making the features of the other characters so visible and his not, is he removing critique of himself from the viewer? Through January 5. The Menil Collection, 1533 Sul Ross, 713-524-9400. — AO
"Rachel Hecker: Group Show" The massive foam finger isn't even the strangest thing you see in this exhibition. Nor is the snowman, the twirling bottle of Xanax or the huge ear stuffed with a cotton ball. Indeed, the most curious thing in "Rachel Hecker: Group Show," Hecker's new exhibit at Art League Houston, is a pile of jumping peanuts atop a white column. The Peanuts (2013), which are actual edible legumes, are attached to motorized magnets, causing them to jerk and jump around at random intervals. It is these Peanuts, in their abject randomness, that define the entire exhibition, a collection of 18 sculptures and paintings that sit and hang throughout the gallery in no particular order. Yes, it is odd. But as Hecker explains, "I want to give myself more permission to do whatever occurs to me without reservation." As for the Peanuts: "I like things that are animated that shouldn't be animated." Hecker is an artist who defies artistic authority. Though her main medium is large-scale painting, she "deplores" the rigidity of it. And so, while creating series such as notes-lists 1, paintings of handwritten grocery and to-do lists, she would create odd, figurative sculptures as the ideas struck her. "Group Show" collects these off-ramp oeuvres and puts them into Art League's Main Gallery. Altogether, "Group Show" looks like the shambles of a mental meltdown. Next to the bottle of Floating Xanax is The Ear That Cannot Hear (2006), which gets a corner to itself. As it sticks to the wall, the "cotton ball" made of EPS foam sits inside its canal, so while you're doped up on meds, your auditory senses are suspended as well. The lean pink skin of Finger Statue (2013) features a freshly manicured nail on the front, a stamped happy face on back. The hanging Peppermint Air Freshener (2006) is actually wood cut into an exponentially larger model of a car air freshener, then lacquered in a red so bright that you almost catch a whiff of its advertised candy-sweet smell as it swings from the gallery ceiling — even if your thoughts are fuzzy and your ears are blocked, you can still smell. Again, odd. Prudent guests would avoid this madness, mind the Caution Cuidado (2013), the acrylic on canvas re-creation of police tape, step over the rabbit hole, and forgo the topsy-turvy world of mechanics and medicine bottles in favor of a more conventional art experience. Hecker, however — the Artist in Wonderland — jumps in fearlessly, tearing past the warning tape into a world with no limits and no rigidity — and it pays off. "Group Show" is fun and exciting, a departure from restrictive canvases of straight lines and plain colors. And that's exactly what she wants. Through November 15. 1953 Montrose, 713-523-9530. — AO
