Perrotin is happy to current the gallery’s second exhibition with London-based painter Oli Epp, titled Fireplace the Menu. Presenting a brand new suite of surrealist work, he depicts opulence as efficiency and captures the unsaid paradoxes the inhabit our lavish wishes.
Oli Epp’s kitchen is a microcosm of his imaginative universe. Between the collectible Invoice Bell McDonald’s plates and cat-shaped and designer teapots, there’s a delicate picket pantry stuffed flooring to ceiling with sweet. The cabinets overflow with kiwi Hello-Chews, gummy ropes, bite-sized chocolate bars, and even a gumball machine containing peanut M&M’s. Smiling by means of straight, white enamel—a testomony to his mom’s occupation as a dentist—Epp eagerly invitations guests to take as a lot as they need. This scene is emblematic of Epp’s art work, the place the attract of glistening sweets serves as a potent image. The sweet, with its brilliant colours and speedy gratification, mirrors the seductive surfaces and tantalizing particulars of his work. But, beneath this sugary exterior lies a deeper commentary on need, consumption, and the fleeting pleasures of up to date life.
Born in 1994 in London, Oli Epp studied on the Metropolis & Guilds of London Artwork College. His distinctive inventive course of includes meticulous planning— from preliminary sketches to the ultimate layers of paint, creating works that mix humor and critique. Epp’s work begin as instinctive drawings and move by means of digital manipulation earlier than being realized on canvas with oil, acrylic, and airbrush. His works pop with vivid colour and sharp strains, creating a satisfying visible expertise that belies the underlying nervousness concerning the human situation.
The present’s title, Fireplace the Menu, references the restaurant terminology for ordering a complete menu, connoting a lavish but gluttonous occasion. Within the sequence, Epp ready a feast for the senses, a visually opulent and surreal exploration of extravagance and contradiction. Epp’s work, with their oneiric high quality, could be learn as a dialectic of the seen and the hid, a commentary on the interaction between the superficiality of appearances and the depth of human expertise. His works have interaction with the absurdity of extra and the spectacle of efficiency, presenting a actuality that’s directly heightened and splintered.
Drawing on the aesthetics of well-liked media and the omnipresent digital panorama, Epp’s canvases are a theater of need and consumption, manifesting in luxurious sushi rolls, modern pop-star physique mics, and glamorous silk gloves. His artwork captures the frenzied, kaleidoscopic essence of up to date life, embedding human and animal types inside a fragmented narrative that oscillates between fascination and unease, intimacy and alienation. By distorting actuality, Epp reveals deeper truths, difficult viewers to query the veracity of their perceptions in an period the place reality and fiction are always interwoven by expertise and media.
In distinction to his earlier works, which frequently featured trendy expertise, in Fireplace the Menu expertise is conspicuously absent. As an alternative, Epp employs symbols of classical method—string devices, picket easels, acrobatics, and the faint footlights of a stage. This shift in focus underscores a deeper exploration of the instruments and performances that form modern tradition. By omitting direct references to trendy expertise, Epp brings consideration to the enduring and performative features of human expression, making a dialogue between previous and current strategies of manufacturing and consuming artwork. This transition from high-tech to classical types emphasizes the timeless nature of inventive observe and its function in defining cultural narratives.
Epp’s course of displays the dialogue of method in a form of materials ballet, incorporating digital and conventional media, his brushstrokes are exact, strains are sharp, and colours are daring. His large-scale canvases juxtapose the hyper sensible textures and sheen of matte acrylics with elongated types and conjoining or sprouting members. The work seem like in a state of transition between liquid and stable, clear and opaque, and this dynamic interaction is mirrored within the compositions themselves, as they veer into the deep finish of his consciousness.
Epp describes the work on this exhibition as light struggles and quiet struggling, presenting photographs which are concurrently alluring and uncanny. Every portray tells a distinct story, creating modern allegories that commemorate and critique client tradition. In Rivalry, two flamingos are depicted tangled in a pink ribbon. Their eyeless faces, maybe devoid of soul, wrestle to carry out their signature grace and exoticism however are ensnared by their adornments. The contorted birds are a cautionary story of the impossibility of equilibrium and the futile efforts to take care of appearances in a world obsessive about spectacle.
In one other work, The Nice Unveiling, Epp enlists the elephant’s heart-shaped silhouette to conjure symbols of knowledge and emotion. But, portrayed shrouded at a picket easel, seemingly pressured to color, the famously emotive and highly effective creatures are diminished to performing circus tips, producing golden eggs that litter the ground. Epp has commented that this portray is barely autobiographical, reflecting the pressures of inventive manufacturing and the commodification of inventive output.
Epp’s capability to mix critique with visible attraction makes his work each accessible and thought-provoking. The artist invitations us all to “take as a lot as we would like” – to indulge, however with a twinkle-toothed reminder of the paradoxes that animate his inventive universe. Beneath the floor, all the things is masked: a lobster swathed in golden jewellery, a unadorned physique obscured by sushi— all of it an absurd but calculated efficiency. It’s all there, snarled in contradictions, bow-like legs and arms or a one-woman band taking part in each instrument directly. Nothing is because it appears, however all the things is strictly what you need. Fireplace the Menu is a testomony to Epp’s evolving inventive observe and his ongoing exploration of the complexities and decadence of up to date life.