MOREL Olivier : L'ARCHE

Olivier MOREL

Born in Paris in 1964
Making paintings, etchings, sculptures.
Teacher of plastic arts at Atelier de Sevres in Paris.
Illustrator.

Drawer, engraver and painter, Olivier Morel, has been having shows since 2000 in France, Germany, and Norway. He has had 15 solo shows and 19 group shows and is now invited to show his work in Geneva, Switzerland.

He is teaching Plastic Arts in Atelier de Sèvres, in Paris.

This Artist holds a Diplôme Supérieur d'Art Plastique from the ENSBA in Paris. He likes writing, and is author and co-author of different books. He has written several reviews.

For a very long time, he has been attracted to Asia, the oriental philosophies, Buddhism and meditation and bases his work on pictures and notes from his travels. 

He then selects patterns and drawings and proposes a subjective vision, a new composition of reality.

From 2005 to 2010, Olivier completed a first series of paintings that focus on Japan. A second series emerged following a trip to India in 2009. His work is a reflection of his thoughts on consumerism, pollution and sustainable development.

Sometimes, he finds inspiration in documents and pictures he discovers in the media. In 2011, right after the tsunami and the nuclear accident in Fukushima, he assembled old documents and web images to compose a tribute to the victims of the disaster that he named “Triptych de Fukushima”.

After the hurricane Washi, in Mindano island (end of 2011), he completed an enormous painting (3x2m) inspired from a magazine picture that shows three people trying to find shelter in a flooded street.

This violence reminds him of a Japanese drawing he had photographed a few years earlier in the Tokyo National Museum. This painting seems to be the outcome of the fury of the natural elements, a storm that causes the sky to rain gigantic fish, both afraid and frightening, that fall on the Earth to destroy everything in their way. He once more produces an enormous painting of 3X2m.

Olivier Morel continues on this path and tries to reconcile an earth-register below with a «fantastic» one from above. Surprisingly, the canvas above addresses the aquatic life: fishes, crabs, jelly fishes.

While in Monterey, close to San Francisco, he was fascinated by jellyfish, flowing and flying in an enormous and illuminated aquarium. Out of this fascination four paintings are created, which are attached to his idea of the “New World.” This new world of Columbus, the one of 650 millions years ago and the one of tomorrow, never stops moving but carries on with the artist’s new creations and visions.