Oliver Pavic

(Frankrig/Slovenien – f. 1986) 

OLIVER PAVIC BIO
Oliver Pavic is a self-taught artist with an architectural background. Born in 1986 in Slovenia (former Yugoslavia), he grew up idolizing free Western world.
Events such as the fall of Berlin wall and the Balkan War of the 90’s gave Oliver new possibilities in achieving freedom of expression.
He started his architectural journey in the capital of Slovenia, Ljubljana but graduated and became an architect in London.
In 2008 he visited Francis Bacon’s retrospective at Tate Britain which had a profound effect on his life. The need to self-express artistically led him to France, where in 2015 he set up his studio in the champagne region and embarked on a journey as an artist painter.

Oliver takes possession of art history as his creative birth right, distorting classical images and bringing them into tension with contemporary experience.
Past and present ebb and flow on his canvases, taking arts historical images and inserting them into contemporary narratives.
The image is thus squeezed between contemporary realities represented by fields of disfiguration and found interpretations.
The resulting totality challenges our perception of time, history and memory where “then” and “now” are locked into a relationship we ourselves, as viewers, must balance.

OLIVER PAVIC ARTIST STATEMENT
I’m fascinated by the dialogue between old and new. It has been a constant in my work since the Covid pandemic. I create through techniques of figural deconstruction and recomposition.
I reclaim subjects and distress, disfigure and strip away their surface. Through a constant dialogue with materials, I dismantle and re-interpret forms in order to create anew.
The visceral accidentality in my works becomes a conductor for reflections, allowing the viewer to experience its own narrative and form its own interpretation.

My body of work since the Covid pandemic is inspired by 18th Century “Grand Style” portraits, idolization of Francis Bacon and current social issues and trends.
While in lockdown I started to chronicle my state of mind. The process itself became therapeutic. The deeper I got into the isolation the more intense the paintings became. I would deconstruct my own figure and reconstruct it with gestural marks influenced by my then current state of mind.
Topics that I was addressing were anxiety, depression, vanity, euphoria and all kinds of addictions. These led to current topics such as being a foreigner, capitalism, social media, conformism, ecology and acceptance to name just a few.
I paint in the hope that my work isn’t generically indifferent and that it evokes strong meaningful reactions.

To quote myself: “I’d rather you hate my painting than casually walk past it”.