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Olivier Longpré​

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Canned intimacy 

12.06.2025 - 19.07.2025

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By the end of his university career in the late 90s, Olivier Longpré's precocious career was the envy of young painters of his generation. Already, his magnificent drawings and paintings were available to avid collectors through the grace of a renowned gallery. Above all, we admired the extraordinary conceptual and aesthetic tour de force that enabled him to introduce explosive connotations into the homes of his buyers.

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The tension between the apparent vulnerability of the subjects, a few clues and the judicious framing turned what is outside of the frame into a vanishing point for the imagination. At any moment, the whole could shift towards horizons of promise, threat or mere banality. Lacking reference points, we had to rely on our expectations and prejudices.

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Olivier laid a tightrope between intimacy and the gout du jours. Not surprisingly, the demands of an increasingly obtuse market got the better of Olivier's skilfully orchestrated and delicate balance. He thus made a clean break from the art world but continued to work in his studio. His last exhibition took place in 2010.

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The series of unpublished portraits presented here fifteen years after was created between 2008 and 2015. In these, the artist captured the countenance of strangers as soon as he met them on Chatroulette. [1]  It is a repertoire of stratagems improvised by his subjects as they resist and fend off the prying gaze of a stranger. A radical inversion has taken place: there is no longer a vanishing point for the imagination; everything implodes in the cramped confines of the chat room, and absorbed by the anonymous, obstinate opacity of the sitters absorbs everything. Olivier explores a space that broods resilience in the face of the gradual and merciless conquest of the subjective by social media and artificial intelligence. He abandons the expectations of an audience of art collectors to discover the territory of freedom unfurled by young web surfers.

The thread remains taut, the acrobat nimble.

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[1] Chatroulette is an online chat website that pairs random users with a choice between two other users for webcam-based conversations. Visitors to the website begin an online chat (audio and video) with another visitor. At any point, either user may leave the current chat by initiating another random connection.

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