About

"Dicking around is fine. Just make sure you're serious about it."

In trying to capture the iridescence of childhood, Oliver's work hones in on play and the obfuscation of our shared objective reality. Finding a simplicity of making from imagination and curiously interrogating the world, which is a very psychedelic place once you drill down into the nuts and bolts of it.

A lot of form, colour, and structure found and abstracted in Oliver's paintings stem from ephemera such as print catalogues of American department stores from the 1960s and 70s and the colour schemes of lounges that are pillaged for reference. Or the Encyclopedia of Astronomy's images taken during the space race, the spectrum of colours, found at a galactic level, always make for a nice gradated background.

The low-hanging fruit of ideas has all been picked, and in order to find new ground, paintings often found in traditional subject matter, the vase of flowers, the bowl of fruit, a horse, a boat, are subverted. Finding a level of humor and comedy in the blandness of the mundane where a new world is remade to reflect what could be, Oliver's works that step into that world with a sprinkling of the absurd over the top, flowers shaking hands, a sock puppet wearing a cowboy hat, a voguing dandelion, all tip their hats.

Having worked with a background in graphic design, a practice rooted in tradition, everything placed on a grid, so much of what is represented in Oliver's current practice is painted as a rebellion against that. Where previously there was a focus on the clean-cuts, the legibility, and the lack of ambiguity. That which must adhere to the ideas of those who came before and knew better. The rampant and frantic abstraction in the works, mirrored by the precision of form, rallies against order and justification, replaced with exploration, being unbound, and a forward look. Whilst the design process of iteration is used in the background to create the works, Oliver forgoes the usual idea of removal and instead adds layers, removing only the areas underneath. Our current landscape, both politically and socially, is littered with reminders of a potential dystopian paradox, the possibility of a bountiful future, but a weak present which is in stark contrast to the potential offering that was sold to us in the past. Oliver's work looks to carry the torch of that abandonment found in yesteryear in order to find a new avenue for expression of familiar things. Whether in childhood objects that carry a silent weight with them emotionally, or in a sheer visual assault of colour and form that isn't supposed to soothe, but slowly unravels with more interrogation.