Oliver Coran

Courtesy Galerie Lars Friedrich

I first met Oliver two years ago when I visited his exhibition in his apartment with a friend. I was impressed by the large, flamboyant paintings. Some were fairly figurative and sketchy in black and white, while others featured an expressive palette of bright colours. The paintings were made on a thick layer of slightly milky-coloured plastic. There was only one work on canvas.

At his second exhibition in the gallery, there are mostly paintings of female nudes on canvas and one larger painting on plastic. The plastic painting is hung on the gallery’s most prestigious wall, but somewhat offset. This makes the wall behind it part of the image, changing it. The colour appears to slide off the wall, as if the nude torso is trying to arrive in the scenery. However, as the image is constantly in motion, the figure can never fully settle into it.

This arrangement creates space for the work opposite. It is a painting of a jumping pair of legs on a canvas with thick brown brushstrokes on a yellowish background. Perhaps the yellow tone mimics the plastic, the movement is happening in the figure. On the canvases it becomes obvious that the image never fully coincides with what it refers to; for example, there isn’t a face, and the hair dissolves into pencil lines. The figures elude their complete form and full function just as they are obsessively and seemingly breathlessly painted over and over again.