García Oliver

The group of eighteen portraits we now present correspond to the period 1924 to 1937; they are therefore works from his youth. Although their current provenance does not allow us to trace their origin with complete certainty, the fact that they have been kept in the same folder and that all the sitters are family members or friends suggests that they were kept by the artist himself or his entourage. Most of them are painted with grease pencil on laid paper of different manufacturers and colours, except for one of them, in which he used red wax for the background and the flesh tones. On occasions García Oliver used shades of oil colour applied to the lips, teeth and pupils to add intensity to the features and personality of the sitters. Most of them show the use of a fixative which, with the passage of time, has yellowed the faces. Virtually all are signed and dated, and include identifications and some inscriptions in which he displays the typographical skills that he must have learned with his father in the composition of ex libris.