A large-scale three channel video projection in which the artist’s paintings are brought to life through animation, immersing the viewer into an underwater seascape featuring a nearly life-size whale.
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. In Calling, for instance, a village church comes into view as a bird beats its wings overhead. A phone call is made from a booth on the street and as it rings a mother and her children walk down a staircase. A pink house floats by, and a figure draws back the curtain to view the world outside. This figure might be the same character Olivier was inspired by:
“I imagine the exhibition to be about a guy behind a window of his house looking at the 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 is not necessarily something the viewer sees, or even has to see.”
