Fusing paint and moving image, Jacco Olivier creates short, painterly animations that depict a variety of subject matter, ranging from scenes of daily life to elemental landscapes and abstract forms. Every painting is repeatedly reworked in generous, casual strokes and systematically photographed at each stage of development. The resulting films are enigmatic and experiential– moving in and out of abstraction they reveal the traces and decisions made by the artist in the process of painting. The works for which Olivier first became known are, with few exceptions, small-scale single projections of concise narrative episodes that appear in a microcosmic, dreamlike world. However, Whale, 2006, in which the artist imagines a whale's movements so that it disappears and reappears in a painterly field, is split across three projections and spans some twelve metres in total. 

While there is a clear and quite complex process involved in their creation, Olivier does not set a thematic agenda for the works, or for their relationship to one another. The films are instead imagined as windows on to converging, and often elegantly simple, moments of daily life–a bus journey, a swim in the ocean, or a walk through the wood. In Calling, 2006, for instance, a village church comes into view as a bird beats its wings overhead. A phone call is made from a booth on the street and as it rings a mother and her children walk down a staircase. A pink house floats by, and a figure draws back the curtain to view the world outside. At this convergence of painting and cinema lies an uneasy tension, a feeling that something is about to happen or has just happened that is unexpected and beyond our control.

More recently, a shift in Olivier’s practice has seen a move away from intimate projections in favour of larger scale works closer to the language of painting than that of animation. The shift in scale also brings to the fore the viewer’s relationship to the work as an object, adding a spatial and physical dimension to the viewing experience. The aerial view of Landscape, 2010, for instance, evokes a feeling of flying over ever changing abstracted fields. The large-scale, twenty-four minute film Revolution, 2010 puts the viewer in the middle of the universe, while a film such as Adem, 2015, where drips of colour come to life, seems to occupy a more mental space. By pushing the painterly fields to the edge of abstraction, Olivier makes a departure from the storytelling that characterised his smaller projections, opening up a space for sensations of perception, consciousness and memory. 

Born in 1972, Jacco Olivier lives and works in Amsterdam. In 2012 Olivier staged an outdoor exhibition of six painterly animations at Madison Square Park, New York; he has additionally recently exhibited at Indianapolis Museum of Art, 2016, solo; Galerie der Stadt Backnan, 2015, solo; Museum Hilversum, 2014; GEM, The Hague, 2014, solo; Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, 2013; Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst, Amsterdam, 2012, solo; Artpace, San Antonio, Texas, 2012; Fundación Foto Colectania, Barcelona, 2012;  Stedelijk Museum Zwolle, Zwolle, Netherlands, 2012;  Dordrechts Museum, Netherlands, 2011–12; Denver Art Museum, Denver, 2011; the 8th SITE Santa Fe Biennial (2010-11); Centro de Arte de Caja de Burgos, Burgos, Spain, 2010, solo; Victoria Miro Gallery, London, 2010; Blaffer Gallery, The Art Museum of the University of Houston, 2010, solo and Portsmouth Museum of Art, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 2010.