Errance | Olivier de Cayron

Olivier de Cayron is a child of the sixties, alternating between Op art and POP art. This heritage is evident in the artist’s colourful works, where the POP spirit is constantly present in the iconic views he presents to the viewer and in the graphic treatment he imposes on the photographs he captures from the four corners of the world. This wandering becomes the most direct witness to a popular culture that has continued to spread across the face of the planet, under the combined effect of American soft power and an aesthetic globalisation that now familiarises us with the exotic? Colourful taxis from New York and Asia, Japanese manga, skyscrapers and other buildings join trains and speed as universal symbols of our contemporary societies. The artist is ‘accidentally French, accidentally European’, but he could come from any country, so universal is his expression.

His territorial and historical roots have disappeared in favour of a new floating identity, resolutely contemporary, without borders and without a past. By abandoning his abstract paintings in favour of photographic construction, Olivier de Cayron has introduced a new relationship between the viewer and his work, a participatory relationship, a wandering through his three-dimensional spaces that have become alive, changing and dynamic. This work of transforming the banal into the iconic offers viewers a meditation on our own condition, paradoxically offering this society of speed a freeze-frame, a “bug” in the incessant flow of everyday stimuli.