Olivier Petiteau
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Olivier Petiteau

France • 1974

Biography

Olivier Petiteau « grew up Â» in the repetitive sound of the machine tools of a factory. The factory closed. He then discovered emptiness and absence. Since then, he has been trying to  Â» express  Â» reality, with works that are in relation with their time. Cultivating doubt and dissatisfaction, only experimentation keeps him going. Like François Morellet – his neighbour in Cholet – he deploys almost mechanical systems. Like Carlos Cruz-Diez, he follows a repetitive approach to formalism. Like Bertrand Lavier, he stages the world and a form of language…
In his works, lines, then lines, and then more lines. Juxtaposed, side by side, repeated, all the same, and all different, like a signage in which contrasts bring light, rhythm, movement, depth of space, illusion. The optical consequences, the vibration are to be considered as a musical setting of reality, with « ordinary Â» materials, of industrial manufacture, and colours from bombs, artificial and defined, as simple information placed side by side. Everything is an illusion, Â» explains Olivier Petiteau. And my painting is a kind of mise en scène of this mirage, a kind of pictorial irony exaggerating the false to invite the true Â».

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