Jacco Olivier is a young Dutch painter who uses animation to illuminate the narrative process of painting. Olivier fuses painting and moving images in tiny, projected, animated works that invest small and intangible moments with a magical lyricism.
Olivier begins with a painting that he paints over time and again; photographing each stage, until the original slowly degenerates and finally disappears all together. What remains is an animated history of the work, a slice of time, which captures scraps of narrative and memories that are joined together to form a moving picture.
Between the groups of colors and abstract forms of paint, Olivier reveals a microcosmic animated world of informal situations – a frog tries to cross the road, men walk in a field, an airplane flies overhead. These mementos are small, chance reflections about both the nature of the world and the nature of painting. There is a casual uneasiness and tension, a feeling that something is about to happen or has just happened, but there are no definitive answers, beginnings or conclusions. Rather Olivier's animations find their own place in the margins, somewhere between a story and a painting.
Moving Pictures is Jacco Olivier's first solo exhibition in New York and will include seven new films. The artist's work is also currently on view at Victoria Miro Gallery in London. Jacco Olivier was born in the Netherlands in 1972, he graduated from the Rijksakademie in 1998 and lives and works in Amsterdam.