Jacco Olivier: First Take July 20, 2010

'First Take,' Jacco Olivier's first solo museum exhibition, brings together ten works created between 2003 and 2010. Olivier's luscious filmic vignettes are quiet meditations on painting set in motion. Technically, his work falls into the category of animation. Images are repeatedly reworked and rephotographed to create a narrative that unfolds through a camera-driven progression. Olivier likes to tell a story, but even in his most anecdotal works, the most interesting tale is the story of painting itself. For each work, Olivier repaints the same canvas over and over again, carefully photographing each stage of development. In time the original image slowly degenerates and finally disappears altogether in the cumulative layers of paint. The final work, the photographic record, thus becomes an animated history of a painting, a slice of time that captures scraps of narrative and memories, and joins them together to form a moving picture with an atmospheric charge enriched by an ambient soundtrack.