Olivier JUNG

SOLO EXHIBITIONS
France : Paris (Galerie Arcturus, Galerie Linz, Galerie du Fleuve, Galerie F. Roulette, Galerie de l’Horloge)
Sweden : Stockholm (Galerie Jan Wallmark, participation of the  French Institut)

GROUP EXHIBITIONS
France : Paris (Galerie Arcturus, Galerie du Fleuve, Galerie F. Roulette, Galerie de l’Horloge, Galerie Art & Patrimoine, La Coupole, L’Oreille Cassée)

BIBLIOGRAPHY
2002 : « Animaux Animés », Edition Flammarion.
2000 : « Novembre » by N. Malinconi for the collection « L’essentiel au détail », Edition l’ABcédaire.
1999 : Order of five books for Editions Flammarion.
1994 : Order of the dance compagny « Fattoumi-Lamoureux » (portraits of dancers).
1993 : Center of Contemporary dance of Angers, Realisation of a series of drawings for the show « Miroir aux Alouettes » ; the poster of the show with the graphist P. Apeloig

FROM GRAVITY TO GRACE

To speak of our time without denouncing, but to observe, to question. To move beyond anecdote and its context while still speaking about humanity, speaking to us.

Olivier Jung uses oil paint on standardized canvases. The subjects, in this case birds, are essential, as long as their form doesn’t weigh them down. They are free and can transform while retaining their essence.

Through the expressions of a De Kooning, of the Cobras, Olivier Jung positions himself to stand apart and be profoundly of his time.

Color in its fullness constructs the painting. The line, like writing, provides the motifs.

The whole merges, loses its axis, becomes off-center, rotates; the points of entry are multiple and open up fields of interpretation.

The weight of things is there, determined, sometimes violent, and yet it falls, rises, twirls, unstable to the point of vertigo, and reflects back to us our current condition, made of gravity and grace. This trembling, this seizing delights and fascinates us.

By Jean-Yves MESGUICH
Paris, June 6, 2005 (translated from French)

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OLIVIER JUNG OR THE STAINED GLASS OF THE WORLD

At first, we don’t hear them. To tell the truth, we don’t see them either. What we hear first is the color. What we see are stained-glass windows. Clear, fresh, sanguine, spiritual, and yet earthly. A question of distance, of course. But not only that: a question of eye and brain. Of seeing and knowing; of knowledge and recognition. “That green patch there, was it a pond?” Cézanne said. A back-and-forth between the retina and consciousness, between reality and canvas. Stained-glass windows, then, whose mesh would move, floating, displaced, jostled by the stains that it, thick though it is, could not contain with its black line. It lives in there, it trembles, it bursts forth, and yet it holds. Movement of the stains and architecture of the line: painting. A series of paintings, itself in motion, overflowing the ever-too-narrow frame, always yearning for a before and an after, a beyond, for the pulse of life. A series is always beautiful: it is time seized and released, bursts of infinity. And, more profoundly, it is an inexhaustible eroticism of art and life that produces moods, colored liquids, mobile forms: more painting, splashes of paint.

Then (have we been told? Have we been shown them? No title!), we distinguish them, we recognize them: there, in this shimmering jumble, are gulls! (I say “gulls,” but the rigorous ornithologist might recognize them as herring gulls. These two birds belong, he tells us, to the Lariformes order. Laughing forms?). Our mental sky is full of gulls: those we saw in Normandy or Brittany; those we were shown (Boudin, Braque, Matisse, De Staël…); those we were given to read about (Rimbaud: “And the droppings of chattering birds with blond eyes”). Olivier Jung’s appear as splashes of orange and white on a blue background. A hastily drawn black line. They are plumed, in a flock, in a colony. Put like that, it sounds simple. But they take off, they fly, they dive. A seagull doesn’t land. It doesn’t pause. The wind carries them, they struggle, they play with it. Try painting wind and flight without betraying them! The blue of the sky is shaken by it.

Crumpled. Blackened by a flight, whitened by a wingbeat, scarred by a beak. Sometimes yellow, in pools. “Sun-kissed lichens and azure snot.” Sometimes red, in drips or streaks. It’s ferocious. It can bleed, even to the point of carnage. Then, it’s a celebration, a celebration of blood and pigments mingling, a beautiful uproar of wing splashes and foam that burst the tangled lines. Calligraphy of the leap and the feast.

And it’s sharp, right up to the ear. For they chirp, the laughing things, they bicker, they tease, they hiss, they whistle, they laugh: you don’t need to be an ornithologist to know that gulls are laughing and seagulls are mocking. You just have to listen and see. Look at their black eyes, by the way: they’re mischievous. In these little wild things, there’s malice, a haughty defiance bordering on the grotesque. Here or there, drunk on space no doubt, the gull resembles a cross-eyed Schadock. And in Olivier Jung’s work, there’s clearly a touch of defiance: a virtuoso and nonchalant way of simultaneously grasping and letting go, of painting without confining. Ensor as a screeching bird. De Kooning who smells of the gray sea and seaweed. Could he also be on the side of the laughing ones? Of those who, out of politeness, have resigned themselves to the elusive model, the fleeting time, the absent life? Carpe diem.

It is the encounter between seagulls and the painter. Between painting in flight and the flight of paint. A rapture and a delight. The seagull here is not a symbol (see Baudelaire’s Albatross) but an irritating, fleeting, elusive, playful, desirable motif: a conspiracy of colors. In short, a palette. It summons all the senses, calls to the jealous body, demands the speed of the arm for a sweet struggle that resembles love. This bundle of feathers between air and water defies the bristles of the brush, which is as if returned to the same materials. It is a free motif that invites freedom, lightness, a kind of random jazz of color and line to invent, as with all painters, the precise surface where the sensory world and sensual painting rub together. Even if Olivier Jung were to change his subject matter, the vivacity of this melodic painting, joyful even in its disquiet, remains the same, delighting the eye with its art; it speaks of the joy of being in the world to which it refers us.

By Philippe RENAULT (translated from French)