Olivier Lannaud

Olivier Lannaud is a French contemporary artist born in Quimper in 1967, whose approach is at the intersection of painting, photography, sculpture, and digital art. Graduating from the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris (ENSAD) in 1992, with honors from the jury, after a specialization in cinema, animation, and video, he very early on develops a transdisciplinary practice where new technologies dialogue with traditional artistic techniques. Since 1991, he participated in the first global exchange of satellite infographics with Japan, presented at the Cité des sciences et de l'industrie in Paris, before working for several years as a graphic designer for French and international television channels.

Since the early 2000s, Olivier Lannaud has built an original work that questions the links between memory, technology, and consumer society. His work combines digitized photography, painting, assemblage, and wall sculpture, giving birth to hybrid portraits covered with everyday objects, electronic cables, or computer components. With his emblematic series MEMOSAÏQUE, he revisits the great figures of mythology, art history, and contemporary culture by using touches of recycled computer keyboards as constitutive elements of the image. This unprecedented process, which he calls "object painting," renews pointillism by transforming fragments of digital tools into real material pixels. Through this approach, the artist questions the digitization of our collective memory, planned obsolescence, and the growing place of technologies in our lives.

Working at the border between plastic art, installation, contemporary portraiture, and sculpture, Olivier Lannaud develops a universe where industrial materials acquire a new symbolic dimension. His works bring into tension the classical iconographic heritage and the most ordinary technological objects, creating a dialogue between tradition and modernity, spirituality and consumption, memory and virtualization. This reflection on the contemporary image is part of a demanding practice where matter becomes a carrier of meaning as much as form.

For more than twenty years, Olivier Lannaud has exhibited his work in numerous personal and collective exhibitions in France and internationally. Among the most notable are "Icônes matérialistes" (Galerie Edgar, Paris, 2004), "Open Space" (Galerie Edgar, Paris, 2006), "Inside Out" (Galerie Edgar, Paris, 2007), "Homme-Objet" (Galerie In My Room, Paris, 2011), "Objectivement Vôtre" (Galerie Depardieu, Nice, 2014), as well as his participation in the Lille Art Up!, AAF Brussels, AAF Amsterdam, AAF London, AAF New York, and St'art Strasbourg fairs. His works are now in many private collections and are regularly shown by several European galleries. With his singular plastic language, Olivier Lannaud establishes himself as an original figure in contemporary art, where portraiture, digital art, recycling, wall sculpture, contemporary painting, collective memory, and technology meet in a profound reflection on our time.