Jacco Olivier
13 Dec 2007 - 02 Feb 2008
JACCO OLIVIER
The Pilar Parra & Romero Gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition by Jacco Olivier in Madrid.
Jacco Olivier uses animations to illuminate his works; initially he paints and takes photographs of key moments in the development of his paintings, until the point where the original degenerates and finally disappears all together. What remains is an animated history of the work that captures scraps of narrative and visual memory joined to form a moving picture.
In this peculiar way Olivier is able to reveal a world of informal situation. In Olivier’s world there is a casual uneasiness and tension, a feeling that something is about to happen or has just happened, somewhere between the past and the future where there are no definitive answers, beginnings or conclusions. Olivier's animations instead find their place in the margins, somewhere between a story and a painting.
For example in Community, in just one minute and ten seconds, we see a small village emerging and we hear a church bell calling. First the camera pans along empty windows until we see a group of people walking in some sort of procession. Blue balls turn from left to right while the group reaches an empty country road where a couple lies in the grass, are they avoiding the community or are they coming to get them?
The centerpiece of the exhibition, Whale, consisting of three panels and is seven minutes long. It shows a whale that appears and disappears in the painterly field, This work summarizes Oliver’s artistic way and especially stressed the multiple situations that his painting technique can generate. Jacco Olivier commented on the matter: “"all the time you are looking at a whale being painted in a tentative, exploratory motion, looking for some truth, looking for some redemption in the paint."
While there is a clear and quite complex process involved in their creation, Olivier does not set a thematic agenda for the works, or for the relationship to one another. The films are instead imagined as windows onto converging, and often elegantly simple, moments of daily life. “I imagine the exhibition to be a guy behind a window of his house looking at things outside, mixing them with his own memories and desires, with the whale upstairs representing his thoughts. That’s all I need to make it work in my head, but it’s not necessarily something the viewer sees, or even has to see.
Oliver’s animations are looking for a place outside of all, somewhere between fiction and painting.
The outcome of his videos is both enigmatic and experimental.
Jacco Olivier was born in Holland in 1972, he graduated from the Rijkakademie in 1998 and currently lives and works in Amsterdam. Until now, he has had solo exhibitions in galleries Marianne Boesky in New York, Thomas Schulte in Berlin and Victoria Miro in London.
The Pilar Parra & Romero Gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition by Jacco Olivier in Madrid.
Jacco Olivier uses animations to illuminate his works; initially he paints and takes photographs of key moments in the development of his paintings, until the point where the original degenerates and finally disappears all together. What remains is an animated history of the work that captures scraps of narrative and visual memory joined to form a moving picture.
In this peculiar way Olivier is able to reveal a world of informal situation. In Olivier’s world there is a casual uneasiness and tension, a feeling that something is about to happen or has just happened, somewhere between the past and the future where there are no definitive answers, beginnings or conclusions. Olivier's animations instead find their place in the margins, somewhere between a story and a painting.
For example in Community, in just one minute and ten seconds, we see a small village emerging and we hear a church bell calling. First the camera pans along empty windows until we see a group of people walking in some sort of procession. Blue balls turn from left to right while the group reaches an empty country road where a couple lies in the grass, are they avoiding the community or are they coming to get them?
The centerpiece of the exhibition, Whale, consisting of three panels and is seven minutes long. It shows a whale that appears and disappears in the painterly field, This work summarizes Oliver’s artistic way and especially stressed the multiple situations that his painting technique can generate. Jacco Olivier commented on the matter: “"all the time you are looking at a whale being painted in a tentative, exploratory motion, looking for some truth, looking for some redemption in the paint."
While there is a clear and quite complex process involved in their creation, Olivier does not set a thematic agenda for the works, or for the relationship to one another. The films are instead imagined as windows onto converging, and often elegantly simple, moments of daily life. “I imagine the exhibition to be a guy behind a window of his house looking at things outside, mixing them with his own memories and desires, with the whale upstairs representing his thoughts. That’s all I need to make it work in my head, but it’s not necessarily something the viewer sees, or even has to see.
Oliver’s animations are looking for a place outside of all, somewhere between fiction and painting.
The outcome of his videos is both enigmatic and experimental.
Jacco Olivier was born in Holland in 1972, he graduated from the Rijkakademie in 1998 and currently lives and works in Amsterdam. Until now, he has had solo exhibitions in galleries Marianne Boesky in New York, Thomas Schulte in Berlin and Victoria Miro in London.