Recent Video Works: JACCO OLIVIER

The painter and filmmaker, Jacco Olivier, links painting with the moving image, creating short, small-scale animation-videos; series of small paintings, loose in style, are continuously revised and photographed systematically at every new stage of development. Incidentally, the films that emerge from this procedure are baffling though astutely conceivable. Through continuous mediation between representation and abstraction, various traces and determinations become apparent.

Jacco Olivier associates his work with a character searching for truth and salvation in color. Furthermore, he remarks that the similarities in his work relate to their clear structures and coincidently complex conception. Olivier perceives them as windows to converging and often elegant everyday-moments: “I imagine the exhibition focusing on a man standing in front of a window in his home, observing the world outside it and digesting these images with a mixture of his own memories and wishes. This notion is enough for it to work out in my head but it’s not necessarily suggested that the viewer perceives it this way, nor is it required.”

As yet, Olivier’s works have been mainly small-scale single-channel projections of scant, concise narrative episodes in an often dream-like world. His 2005, seven-minute film, Whale, composed of a nearly 12-meter wide, three-pieced animation, marks his first departure from the small-format. In the current exhibition, Olivier will almost exclusively be presenting large- and medium-scale projections, thereby insinuating an environment that at first glance might appear like an exhibition of paintings, constantly altering their façade, creating a completely individual take on reality.