Olivier Roller. Figure di Potere, Serie II

Olivier Roller, appreciated French photographer and expert on contemporary portraiture, will present his second exhibition in Italy with Spazio Nuovo. The show, under the patronage of the French Embassy, will be inaugurated in the presence of the artist on Wednesday, June 11, at 7:00 p.m. and will last until July 19, 2014.

When the Louvre in Paris commissioned Olivier Roller (Strasbourg, 1971) his first set of portraits dedicated to the statues of Roman emperors, he was far from imagining that he was about to go on a timeless trip into the deep soul of power. A trip that also led him to portray, very successfully, the most important characters of the media, politics and international finance. A research that the two curators, Guillaume Maitre and Paulo Pérez Mouriz synthesize with an efficacious selection of 20 heretofore unpublished works: sumptuous representations of antique sculptures preserved in the most famous museums of the world and contemporary portraits of men of power, from the most varied walks of life.

Roller grabs statues and contemporary characters taking them away from obscurity and oblivion. Light is the acute eye that awakes glory, charisma and passion, but also instincts and tragedies. An elaboration that succeeds in grasping different dimensions, an expression that joins strength and consent, authority and vanity as well as fragility. The photographs on show catch the eye for the alchemic contrast between antiquity and the contemporary world. A dialogue that translates the idea of power into a current concept, underlining the evolution of images through the last two thousand years.

Olivier Roller’s talent is exactly in this, in his mastery regarding XXI century portraits applied to men of power. A crude, direct, sincere, true cut and yet sublime. It is this very poetic strength, rare and implacable, which, recalling the artist’s great success obtained at the Les Rencontres festival in Arles, was confirmed at the presentations of his works in Lyon, Bruxelles, Paris and Milan.

Born in Strasbourg in 1971, Olivier Roller dedicates his work almost exclusively to portraits. Writers, men and women from politics, actors and great men of the world, form a set of faces regularly published on the press. A thought on the images of power was born from this daily exercise. “If power is motionless, men of power are fragile. They are ministers, publicists, councillors, media owners. What is photographed is changing power, as if suspended” Olivier Roller writes.

Quotations from the artist:
« Making a portrait is like besieging a fortress and finally conquering it. »
« I am not looking for a light that casts light on something, but that clads it as if coming out of the person’s skin rather than pose on it. »
« We live in the era of image and it has never been so mute. »