The Imaginary Lands of Olivier Peltier

Is he an artist or a cartographer? The traveller equipped with these pictures, designed as charts of lost, or soon to be lost continents will only find his way towards introspection.

Olivier Peltier paints his pictures in different sizes on canvas, cut into small squares then mounted on wooden panels. These ageless palimpsests are thus imaginary lands. Certain parts remind one of Combas’s or Di Rosas’s portrayals. In other respects, the surfaces of his works appeal to the researches of Jean-Charles Blais, who, in the eighties, painted on retrieved supports and notably on torn-down hoardings. With Peltier, the majority of his pictures has a substance of comic strips or photos, covered or partially hidden by superimposed matter, more or less organized in accordance with a layout only known to him. It involves cements and coatings mixed with resin on partly used, obliterated and cracked sheets. The means used by Olivier Peltier are borrowed from the street and from pop-art culture, but this street is Venetian and the pop-art calls to mind Art Spiegelman and Hugo Pratt. There is something of the bricklayer in Peltier, but the bricklayer is an artist. He comes from a time before the linguistic and social break between artist and artisan… The approach is not mannered nor simply intellectual: it is a combat. He has to confront himself with physical materials in order to achieve a working drawing. After painting and organizing on the canvas, there is an important step when he places the canvas on the ground to work on it before cutting it out. Placing it flat is a serious approach, just like the bricklayer who organizes a mosaic firstly kneeling, then standing. The distance between the ground and the artist’s eye is necessary for choice and composition. This shaping of materials produces the very particular appearance of the whole. Artist and mosaics worker, the way of working on the flat and on the ground reminds one of the way Jackson Pollock worked, but is different because of the desire to not allow random or free choices. Olivier Peltier’s approach is linked to constraint. The constraints of the base of the canvas (photos or comic strips), then to those of the use of coatings, then the “erosion”, scratching, wearing away and sometimes the use of acids, methylated spirits in order to transform the surface of this first cut-out picture. Finally, constraints in the organization of the portions of the collages on the wooden support that makes up the work itself. Olivier Peltier works as if the accumulation of the constraints liberated him from the emptiness of the blank surface of the canvas. There is ritualism in this creative impulsion, and it is also his “profession” and his trade-mark.

Recollections of old towns, ancient streets and bits of memory of each of us, his canvasses do one good because they evoke, for each person, a moment in the past. This game, with the contemplation of a segment of personal history is reached through the feeling of universalism of memories among human beings. Olivier Peltier’s art is complete: he affects one as he emphasizes the memory function. By reaching the nostalgia of every one of us with regard to the personal or collective past, he evokes memories, the subconscious and death. The past he evokes reminds one of a real or fictitious past, lived or re-formed. The backgrounds of comic strips and photos are like quotations from an individual or collective biographer. But their vagueness allows each of us to identify in this past and to incarnate a memory that makes those absent live again.

His work deserves our full attention; that is certain. Above all, it deserves our following its promising evolution as it has a fundamental function in pictorial art; amazement and emotion…

J-Michel Smoluch.

Vienna 28 february/ Venice 22 march.

Translation : Chantal and Anthony Perrin