eality — like nature — is a wild, savage, and beautiful force, a truth so grand as to be sublime that we can never truly fathom it, though we most certainly may try. Art, in its most exalted form, transports us into an ineffable realm, a space where understanding lays beyond the word itself. “We all know that Art is not truth,” Pablo Picasso famously said. “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.”
.
These sentiments speak to the work of Dutch photographer and multimedia artist Erwin Olaf, whose carefully staged images occupy the liminal space between fact and fiction. In the new exhibitions “New Series: April Fool and In the Forest” and “Strange Beauty“, on view in Munich, Germany along with a catalogue, Olaf revisits his archive, looking back over his 40-year career that explores meditative aspects of human emotion, motivation, and thought as well as pressing social and political issues facing women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community.
.
“I always have to be a little bit angry otherwise I don’t work,” Olaf says with a frankness that underlies the heart of a true revolutionary. A rebellion is driven by love, and a desire to tear down false truths propped up by our current world. “I always get the question, ‘Is it real or unreal?’ With photography, why are we thinking we are looking at reality? Olaf asks.
.
“For me, the camera is an instrument to register my imagination and to translate the things in my mind into an image. When we see a painting, we accept that it is from the mind and the spirit of the painter. It’s the same with music, literature, and film. You can go to the cinema in the afternoon, watch a movie, and cry your heart out when you know it’s totally artificial. But when it’s photography, it should be part of the ‘real world.’ I don’t think so.”
.
.
