NEW YORK.- What significance does portrait painting have today? What does it say? What presence does it have? What appreciation does it experience and what sense does it now make? This publications endeavours to explore these questions.The inclined viewer and reader will have the opportunity to familiarise him or herself with the artist Oliver Jordan and his models, both via the painterly process,the accompanying texts, and via his dialogue with Ralf-P. Seippel. The painter, the people portrayed and the viewer encounter each other in a conversation that spans different times and historical periods. In a time of inflated, narcissistically sugar-coated selfpresentations, portrait painting is proving its outstanding position once again.

A further highlight of this publication is its choice selection of authors. Each personality portrayed is accompanied by an individual essay from an either professional or personal perspective. The goal here is to shed light on the multidimensional nature of the respective personalities’ significance, impact, and perception. The authors include not only selected experts from various disciplines, but also collectors, friends, and companions.

This passionate and years-long confrontation with portraits in Oliver Jordan’s work is currently conceived in three volumes.

The present Volume I addresses portraits from the subject matters of the visual arts, philosophy and literature and illustrates the origins, the desire, the becoming and illuminates the characteristic style of Oliver Jordan’s painting.

Volume II, which is already in progress and is planned for publication in spring 2021, lays out the wide array of the musically inspired portraits on a foundation of rhythm, gesture and colour. Volume III will contain portraits as well as commissioned works from the fields of politics,sports and society.

As is the case for many people who work in the creative arts, it is not possible to separate Oliver Jordan’s paintings from him as a person. Consequently, we have intertwined the oeuvre and the biography.

It has become a very personal and passionate book and it could not have been any different. Although the dialogue has a biographical approach and is enriched by anecdotes, it confronts fundamental questions of painting, aesthetics and reception.Visual artists,fellow painters, philosophers, authors, writers, poets, composers, musicians, individuals active in the cultural sector, both from the past and the present, take centre stage. – from the introduction by Ralf-P. Seippel

Oliver Jordan’s painting technique seems asif he too had studied with the bull fighter Luis Miguel Dominguín and had learned in the arenas of Arles or Fréjus that a ‘fleeing torero is a bad torero‘. He crossess words with the master painter,‘attacks’,uses his knife and scraper to place energetic,‘colliding lashes’on the canvas. Picasso’s unending obsession and devouring power is visualised... – from the text by Markus Jorquera Imbernón