Jacco Olivier

Jacco Olivier fuses painting and moving image to create short, intimate animations. Olivier’s works are, with few exceptions, almost exclusively small-scale single projections of concise narrative episodes that appear in a microcosmic world. Every painting is repeatedly reworked in generous, casual strokes and systematically photographed at each stage of development. The resulting films are enigmatic and experiential – moving in and out of abstraction they reveal the traces and decisions made by the artist in the process of painting. 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 their relationship to one another. The films are instead imagined as windows onto converging, and often elegantly simple, moments of daily life  - a bus journey, a swim in the ocean, or a walk through the woods. At this convergence of painting and cinema, however, lies an uneasy tension, a feeling that something is about to happen or has just happened that is unexpected and beyond our control.

Born in 1972, Jacco Olivier lives and works in Amsterdam. He has exhibited at ZKM, Museum fur Neue Kunst & Medienmuseum, Karlsruhe (2007), MCA Denver (2006), Centre pour l’image Contemporaine Saint-Gervais, Geneva (2006) and Istanbul Modern (2005).

Exhibitions