The Alexis Forel Museum gives carte blanche to Olivier Saudan. Freedom on every floor, in every space. For this immersive exhibition to be seen until December 4, the Vaudois artist has invited three accomplices to articulate his universe.
A company that is always surprising, funny, sensitive, schoolboy. Olivier Saudan, the pretty sixty, talks a lot, digresses, with tenderness, vehemence, colors, rather than shades. It looks like his painting.
In terms of subjects, he likes boxers, dogs, bottles of Ajax – as mythological as they are pop -, he venerates the painter Soutine, he likes trips to the North, the icy nights where tiny lights peek out from the horizon, bloody news items, everyday life, knives. He paints life since everything for him is painting, no subject is superior to another, he paints, that’s all.
“I can’t pretend for a moment that I’m going to reinvent painting”
The exhibition for which the Vaudois artist has taken up residence in all the rooms of the Alexis Forel Museum in Morges is designed in a very enveloping way. It begins with a real pair of silver pumps, smeared with paint, placed on a cushion also full of splatters. These are the ones van Gogh had painted. “My work is only made of quotations, of tributes. We do not come from nowhere. I cannot claim for a single moment that I am going to reinvent painting”, explains to RTS Olivier Saudan.
The exhibition offers an almost breath-taking dive into his prolific output. The accomplices of the artist who piloted this exhibition staged well this perpetual flow of need, of the necessity to do, to produce, to say through painting the real and its strata.
We really feel what the artist is doing, and we also see how capable he seems of doing everything, from lyrical abstract painting to vigorous figuration or subtle landscapes, there is something virtuoso in the world of Olivier Saudan.
Florence Grivel/olhor
The exhibition dedicated to Olivier Saudan is to be discovered at the Alexis Forel Museum, Morges, until December 4.
