Jacco Olivier - Microbe - 2012.
Jacco Olivier, born 1972, considers himself a painter. And yet, his works are animations: videos that document the interplay between representation and abstraction, astounding and yet delightfully simple to understand. Every single painting of Olivier's is reworked over and over in rough expressive brush strokes, with the artist recording every stage of painting meticulously by photographing the canvas. The films that result from this documentation process are rapturous animations of narrative episodes. A man bathes, an airplane lands, a woman raps herself into a towel. The viewer is presented with an intimate display of the painter's trade and decision making process as Olivier exposes every change to his composition.
[Microbe] falls into the stylistic category of some of Olivier's more recent large scale works that multilayer various different painterly processes in order to create an overall whole. We watch an abstract microcosmic world float, appear, and disappear. The various layers and elements of paint remind of minuscule forms of organic life. The cumulative levels of non-representational painting that drift over the screen heavily reference Gerhard Richter's "Abstract Paintings" - named by Olivier as one of his two favourite living artists.
The work, Video – Full HD 1080p, 57 secs, is an edition of 1000. Microbe is also part of s[edition]’s dynamic pricing model. As edition availability decreases the price of the work increases.
Jacco Olivier - Pike - 2012.
[Pike], 2012, is a typical sample of Olivier's work: we see a pike hover in what appears to be an underwater world. Both fish and surrounding continuously metamorphose before our eyes as the artist records every change he makes to the canvas. The resulting film presents the viewer with a window into a microcosm of every-day life that is obscured by the coincidently complex conception of the image.
Olivier's work manages to fuse tradition and modernity into a whole new creative form of expression: one of the most classic forms of artistic expression (oil painting) pairs with a quintessentially modern medium (film), producing a digital artwork that references not only the painterly process but art history's narrative itself. [Pike] must be, without doubt, the ultimate video work to own when looking for a painterly expressive, yet digitally formatted, piece of art.
The work, Video – Full HD 1080p, 45 secs, is an edition of 1000. Pike is also part of s[edition]’s dynamic pricing model. As edition availability decreases the price of the work increases.
These limited Jacco Olivier digital editions are available on s[edition] here