Jacques Olivar – Forever Young and ingrained mythology from over the seas…

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    My own Afterhours work draws in part from a longstanding mythology of a golden age folklore of Soho-esque shennanigans; a layered history found down hidden sidestreets, in the red-lit basements of unlicensed speakeasies and jazz allnighters.

    If I was to cast an eye over the seas to the US of A for a comparable deeply ingrained mythology, I think I would probably look towards the stories of the Deep South, a certain gothic Americana or maybe towards the not too far removed overlooked and marginal world of dusty forgotten towns, roadside motels and diners.

    Jacques Olivar-Forever Young-teNeues-Afterhours Sleaze and Dignity

    Along which lines, I have been drawn to Jacques Olivar’s work, which takes that overlooked world as its locale, creating a youth filled, hyper-real, sometimes populuxe-esque vision and version of it, one with high-end fashion production values and gloss but which still contains a certain grit and the intertwined narrative of its homeland locale and stories.

    There is an imagined, filmic quality to the photographs; they could be stills from or fully realised storyboards for a celluloid tale.

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    Along which lines, his works can put me in mind of Wim Wenders and Sam Shepard’s fine, moving 2005 film Don’t Come Knocking – which is set in just such a faded American town, one coloured with a certain velvet, neon-lit rock’n’roll here and there – but as re-shot by Erwin Olaf (see here at Afterhours).

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    The stories of Jacques Olivars have been collected in a book, Forever Young, published by teNeues. Visit that here and peruse it here.

    View the trailer to Don’t Come Knocking here, background on the film here and peruse it here.

    Visit Jacques Olivar in the ether here.

     

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