Olivier Long

Born 1965.

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Olivier Long paints our frightful present: kids in custody hanging themselves, migrants coming from nowhere whom we involuntarily subject to our voyeurism, a teacher committing suicide in her classroom, urban riots scenes that turn into carnivals through the chaotic shift/upheaval of all social classes.

The picture format (often a scale one picture) magnifies what our screens show in miniature in order to keep reality at a distance. That distance makes us lose our capacity to see. When reality is unbearable and when screens bombard us with permanent visual stimulations, it is difficult to maintain real focus. Frantic scopophilia and close danger draw our attention to everything that happens in our range of vision: video games, repeated contact with the screen have turned us into beasts, predators on the lookout with our eyes constantly riveted to our screen prosthesis.

That is why Olivier Long does not simply paint our world: he paints another one, in negative, so that we can understand it better. The composition of his pictures draws from mythology to popular culture and plays on a transposition that allows for layers of complex and problematic meanings. They stop time like in a freeze frame that...

- Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Décoratifs (Paris).
- Ecole des Beaux arts (Clermont-Ferrand).
- Ph.D in Aesthetic (Nanterre University).
- "Agrégation" in Visual Arts (diploma for teaching Visual Arts)
- Master in Visual Effects (ENSAD-Paris)