ABOUT

These are the scenes of everyday life: groups of young people gather to dispel their boredom, commuters are leaving to work, a mother takes her baby out for his daily walk…
The images are familiar. They are seen day after day, week after week, although seeing in this context is relative. One can pass heedlessly by without any sense of involvement: these scenes form nothing more than the décor of modern life. In this appearance they are recalled in the oeuvre of Olivier Deprez. Anonymously and often neutrally depicted, they are assigned the statute of a vague memory.
The work of Deprez radiates melancholy. Each time, the artist returns to that same "evanescent" reality, without emphasizing, without dramatizing. His paintings are never enclosed by their own emotions. The surface is dominated by coolness, an air of distance. The perspective of each work is consequently detached, as from a witness aside.
But if Deprez’ paintings register this detachment, they do so to counteract, as bright green tints and a fiery red are introduced into their surface. The flattened images are in that way systematically being revived as to brutalise the mechanized traffic of the modern person. The work of Olivier Deprez pits itself against the final alienation of human existence. From this point of view it is also significant that the artist ended up in figurative painting – better suited than digital media (photography and film) to record the facts as well as evoking human emotions.
(Bjorn Scherlippens)