Olivier Swizz

In 2000 graffiti spurred the young Frenchman OLIVER SWIZ’ (born 1983) interest in art and a passion for painting. Already as a teenager, he was fascinated by any kind of visual language, which involves the sensual experience of forms and colours. Swiz is inspired by everything that surrounds him, yet with a marked penchant for the urban no-man’s-land. He extracts a formal register from his environment that serves him in creating new spaces, wherein classic forms give way to a complex and dynamic geometry. He deconstructs architectures, urban sceneries and systems with an almost mathematical rigour only to put them back together in completely new way. Swiz’ works thus appear as free interpretations of his immediate environment as seen through a prism of forms and colours. The media of painting comprise canvases just as much as backyards and house walls – back to the roots, as it were. Olivier Swiz lives and works in Paris.