BOESKY EAST is pleased to present an exhibition by Dutch artist Jacco Olivier. This is Olivier’s fourth solo show with the gallery, and includes a selection of the artist’s films and paintings. The exhibition is on view January 10 –February 14, 2016,at 20 Clinton Street, New York, 10002.

Jacco Olivier(B. The Netherlands, 1972) synthesizes mediums, melding together his paintings and photographs into animated narrative films that reveal the processes of their own making. Over time, he has painted small impressionist scenes of everyday life—bathers, lovers, and landscapes—and documented his brushstrokes with a camera,later converting the images into moving pictures. He has carried out this painting-into-film practice with abstract works as well, crafted from pools of translucent acrylics on board.

For this exhibition, Olivier presents these abstract works that are meant for contemplation and pause, as suggested by the most prominent film’s title Adem, meaning “breathe.” To create Adem, Olivier focused on the parts of his paintings that were not consciously applied, the strokes on the edges of his boards for example, or those hidden between layers. By lifting those subtle moments in paint with a camera and “adding the element of time,” as Olivier puts simply, the artist creates an endless, dense, and highly textured sequence of meditational frames that submerge the viewer in their mysterious tranquility. Further adding to the immersive quality of the film, the surface of its projection, of course only light, appears porous and thickened with paint.

The other films shown alongside Adem have a similar sense of equilibrium and tactile composition. Although their formatted imagery does not seem to change much over the course of their duration, their various parts still interact in perpetual movement, and occupy the same amazing, transitory space between a painting and a film. Interestingly, Olivier’s static paintings on view also appear to ebb and flow when seen alongside his animations. For him these paintings’ parts, their forms and colors, were applied sensibly and in all the right places, which retroactively, is how the artist determines whether to transform them into moving films with a clear beginning and end.

Between the paintings and animations, Olivier aimsto establish a pure visual language that is his alone, providing a sense of quietude and balance.He leaves out figuration and storytellingto open up an inner space and a space to breath. In his own words,theworks are“free-flowing visual thoughts like those in the moments just before sleep.”