Olivia Bloch Laine: What if?

“At her Paris studio, I told Olivia Bloch Lainé that the soundtrack to her paintings could well be a Lana Del Rey song. Within the dizzying city, there’s a vacation feeling. A gentle melancholy verging on nostalgia. What if? Family beach scenes, girls snapping selfies on a pontoon, surfers, and the ocean—always present. There’s something bitter and something sweet there. The paintings immerse us in a Californian dream, an iconography inscribed in the collective imaginary of the West Coast, especially of Los Angeles. Harsh, white, almost uniform light. Sharp shadows. Palm trees. All the ingredients are present here. For several years now, the artist has been painting fragments of a regionally specific imaginary that has haunted, infused her, and still fascinates her, even though she did not fully comprehend its origin and stakes at first. A melancholy mood pervades the paintings. What if? A mood underscored by the choice of medium: raw linen. The slightly sepia hue tinges our reading of the images by conferring upon them a memorial, fragile aspect. The images appear faded, as if extracted from a dream or a distant recollection. The artist, attached to postcards that she found at flea markets, to images drawn from magazines, ads, and other print media, repurposes an iconography. She is in search of a past that, without her realizing it, is partly her own. Olivia Bloch Lainé was born under X. She was adopted and has long known it. What if? She lives with a lack that is at the heart of her painting: blurs, absent faces, anonymous bodies, missing places, remorse, even reserve.” Julie Crenn