Home Sweet Remix
By Georgina Oliver
Like all visual artists, Olivia Bloch-Lainé has ways and means of drawing the onlooker into her paintings. Hovering on the edge of reality and mystery, her retro-contemporary oils on canvas mix and match a multiplicity of sources of inspiration ranging from the vintage postcards she collects to old-style advertisements and other ready-made images found on Internet or in magazines, also incorporating personal photographs.
Every picture tells a story and this artist’s pictorial codes tell hers.
Trained at the La Cambre École nationale supérieure des arts visuels in Brussels (ENSAV), she completed her practical art skills with a course at the Sorbonne, where she studied History of Art, before branching out into film and architecture.
This figurative painter’s multi-media expertise – acquired during her former incarnations as a set dresser and interior designer – adds a touch of drama to her XL canvases, which remix the where and when of things, blurring the boundaries between everyday life and imaginary imagery.
Offering us a fresh take on magic realism, Olivia Bloch Lainé lets us into the mind’s eye of the people she depicts. An ongoing series portrays close friends in their homes. We are treated to a sneak peek at their living rooms, which structure her compositions and give us clues to their personalities. Enigmatic apparitions sporting anachronistic clothing – for instance, young women in ’50s style frocks, answering the telephone or playing a record… – stand or sit alongside them.
Who are these phantasmagorical figures? Are they the previous inhabitants of their newly decorated interiors, often featuring furniture from the recent past currently enjoying a revival? Or lost loved ones, recalled whilst flicking through a family album?
A more conceptual interpretation with a feminist twist is possible. This finger-on-the-pulse artist highlights the overtly laid-back lifestyles of modern women in freeze-frame mode. Their relaxed attitude contrasts sharply with the way of life of their forebears: squeaky-clean housewives pictured in 1950s ads flashing “Colgate” smiles in “Spic and Span” kitchens.
As a real-life working mother-of-two, Olivia Bloch-Lainé is well placed to know that neither her mysteriously motionless in situ portraits, nor the lady-like trophy wives – harking back to bygone marketing archetypes – she slips into their hip present-day environments, reflect the hectic reality of life like it is Really, Really for women, from one generation to the next.
Whoever we are – ‘feminist men’ or fellow women (mothers or not) – her unexpected juxtapositions of female stereotypes prompt us to ponder their trans-generational condition, as well as our own.
During a studio visit, which happened to coincide with the unveiling of the official portraits of former President and First Lady, Barack and Michelle Obama, by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald, several references sprang to mind…
First and foremost, Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, 1970-1 – ‘Swinging London’ fashion trailblazer Ossie Clark and the iconic fabric designer Celia Birtwell, shortly after their wedding, at which David Hockney was Clark’s best man. (Clearly in synch with Hockney’s “elastic” view of time, Bloch-Lainé points to a postcard pinned above her desk.)
Then, a rare crowd scene reminds me of British photographer Martin Parr’s Blackpool seaside snaps “seen through a zoom lens, floating like mirages”… (Once more, I’m on target. This painter with a camera eye has a soft spot for Parr. Reaching for a red catalogue, ready at hand on a shelf, she confirms my hunch, with a glint of approval.)
By chance, I had just seen a Year of Murillo show, which struck me as relevant to another key aspect of the work of this keen observer of our natural and familiar surroundings. Barely visible at the bottom right of one of the Spanish baroque master’s religious scenes, exhibited in Murillo and the Capuchins of Seville, at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Sevilla, a detail grabbed my attention.
The painting? The Virgin and Child with Saint Rose of Viterbo. The mysterious soft contoured form that caught my eye? An ox, or a rock? At first glance, mind and retina hesitate between animal and mineral.
Several of the park settings and beachscapes Olivia Bloch-Lainé shows me play on this psycho-visual phenomenon. Thanks to her, I learn that it is known as “pareidolia”.
When working on her plein air and intimist series, she relies on story board-style preparatory drawings and/ or a variety of digital processes to develop dream-conducive images, which morph the living and inanimate, “frequently allowing nature to take over”, notably in her depictions of passersby milling around outdoor spaces.
The Lumière brothers and Nouvelle Vague changed our perception of living beings in the hustle-bustle of their daily environment. Painting and how we see it were never quite the same again, and this cinephile painter delights in shining a light on that metamorphosis.
Olivia Bloch-Lainé hits the pause button, stopping us in our tracks, prompting us to think about the bigger picture, without ever loosing sight of the sheer joy of painting.
