ABOUT THE WORK
... not allowing oneself to be degenerated in an academic manner is a quality of modern art that is all too often overlooked. To remain free, to avoid aesthetic niches, to refuse all constraints, be they themes, techniques or even advice conforming to the market, means to be free in artistic creation, as we can read in the works of Olivia Appelius.
There are no theories holding back her spontaneous work. New, unknown facets of herself and of art in general are constantly revealed. Whether painting or photography, abstract or figurative, there is always a strong artistic drive, a quest for the unknown. The viewer immediately senses the artist's irrepressible, sensual curiosity, with which she confronts the facts of the world, questioning them through her work and arguing them differently. Her art doesn't like appointments. Magnificent!
Dieter Ronte, 2019
Historien d'art, ancien directeur de musée à Vienne (AT), Hannover, Bonn (DE)
PHOTOGRAPHY
The hidden figuration
Art is the spiritual dynamism of emotions manifested in the interplay of ideas and creation.
Olivia Appelius’s complex and sophisticated personality rides this wave, that of the ‘dream of youth’ which permeates her work in its musical, choreographic and pictorial forms. She expresses herself brilliantly, telling us sublime stories and dancing with the canvas; she seeks identity and authenticity, tunes her instrument and delivers powerful chords to all our senses.
She approaches the point of balance between ambiguity and ubiquity in a form of subtle beauty that stirs emotions and follows their movements through a lyrical/poetic approach verging on the elegiac. Olivia Appelius plunges headfirst into this unique sensation, the essence of which she has managed to capture. She shows us the way, imprints her personal style, initiates her gesture and infuses it with its texture, its form, its ideography, a new gestalt, an entity, perhaps a body of work.
Figuration within an abstract composition.
Ewald Stastny, international art curator, former museum director in Venice (IT)
About two paintings
Olivia. Two abstract works of a young artist. Thoughts and questions without answers. What bravery and, at the same time, what naiveté. Does she understand the abysmal depth of this sea? This great tradition? What lightness. Conscious or spontaneous? What emotion. What rationality? Tatian
Tatiana Arzamasova, 2017
Collectif AES+F
PHOTOGRAPHY
Mutation
Although it is well over a century old, photography has lost none of its freshness as an artistic medium, and at times even seems to be in its infancy, given the enduring questions surrounding it.
What is photography in artistic terms? It is, of course, a new medium, but what artistic message does it convey, somewhere between documentary and personal perspective? Will its content be enough to ensure its enduring status as an art form?
The young French artist Olivia Appelius dares to blaze a trail and open new doors through her art.
An iconoclastic and dialectical upheaval of the interface between the instance and the idea, his technique becomes reflection and mirror, a mise en abyme of narratives, oscillations between the clear and the blurred, a dance of pleonasms, blurring the contours that pit opulence against destitution without any contradiction, giving rise to an abstract representation of time as such and in real time, deconstructing the sharpness of focus so that the lens becomes a brush, matter, colour, a line drawing of the utmost delicacy.
This is the crystal-clear photographic language that Olivia Appelius invites us to see and appreciate.
Ewald Stastny, 2015
Commissaire d'exposition international, ancien directeur de musée à Venise (IT)
Sur la série photographique Échos des formes
The photography of Olivia Appelius lends itself to plain sight and regains its essence through ambiguity.
The necessity of Eros is also present.
Ultimately the picture suggests an encounter between turbulence and light.
Robert C. Morgan, 2019, art critic, US