Olivier Rasir, born in Momalle, Liege, Belgium 1973, immigrated to Australia in 1995. He was involved in modelling and acting and began painting in 2003. As a full-time artist, Olivier is an autodidact, he is also involved in natural therapies. Olivier has exhibited around Sydney and his works are held in private and corporate collections in Australia, Canada, Germany, USA, UK and Belgium.

Wild Man Dreaming – 2018
Wild Man Dreaming combines Olivier’s signature painting style (abstract, saturated colour field and line paintings in heavy oil pastels) with a reduced, experimental direction focusing on the fundamentals of abstract painting: raw materials, surface, gestural and incidental mark making. Across both styles, Olivier’s paintings come to life in the viewer’s imagination, where more figurative elements can appear such as aerial views, pathways, gardens and animals.

 As a process-based abstractionist, Olivier’s paintings come from a place of impulsion and poetic expression, where one material or mark will inform the next. Olivier will paint both the front and back of his raw canvas, allowing colours to bleed through to form subtle and soft tonal variation in an otherwise untouched background. In some works, the canvas is cut, folded and manipulated as a medium itself, forming unpainted lines and textures that are incidentally marked along the way. In others, Olivier will write poetry as an underpainting, before overlaying with colour blocks and line work

The colours and forms that begin to appear through his process serve as the starting points for his expressive overpainting, rich with movement, rhythm and balance. The act of painting becomes performative and dance-like, which is effortlessly captured in his unstretched paintings of raw canvas framed under glass. These present the work in its purest form at the end of the painting process, unchanged as it would be in his studio.

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Some of his Works