Jacco Olivier is both a painter and a filmmaker who fuses painting and moving image to create brief, intimate animations. Painted in lush, casual strokes, each canvas is repeatedly reworked and systematically photographed at every stage of its development. The resulting films are both enigmatic and edifying – moving in and out of abstraction they reveal the traces and decisions made by the artist in the process of their painting.

To date, Olivier’s works have been small-scale single projections of concise narrative episodes. In this exhibition, Whale, a seven-minute film, is split across three projections and spans nearly forty feet across the gallery’s rear wall. Imagining a whale’s movements, Olivier renders the animal disappearing and reappearing in a painterly field; at times clearly in view and at others dissolving into abstraction. Olivier observes, “all the time you are looking at a whale being painted in a tentative, exploratory motion, looking for some truth, looking for some redemption in the paint.”

Olivier does not set a thematic agenda for the works, or for their relationship to one another. The films are instead imagined as windows onto converging and elegantly simple moments of daily life. In Calling, a village church comes into view as a bird beats its wings overhead. A phone call is made from a booth on the street and as the telephone rings, a mother and her children walk down a staircase. A pink house floats by; a figure draws back the curtain to view the world outside. This figure might be the same character by which Olivier was inspired:

I imagine the exhibition to be about a guy behind a window of his house looking at the things outside, mixing them with his own memories and desires, with the whale upstairs representing his thoughts. That’s all I need to make it work in my head, but is not necessarily something the viewer sees, or even has to see.