OLYMPE RACANA WEILER - Art Residency

During her residency at Gate 44 the artist Olympe Racana-Weiler focused on a series of works on paper combining large-scale monotype silkscreens and woodcuts, deeply immersed in the process of self-discovery through image making while adopting new technical solutions and aesthetic directions.

Olympe Racana-Weiler (b.1990) is a French-Argentinian artist living and working in Paris (FR) best known for her paintings characterized by a generous outburst of colors and textures bridging abstraction and figuration. Her visual research expands in a combination of expressive fearlessness and careful craftsmanship - with particular focus on printmaking techniques - also cultivated wile working both as an assistant and as an artist in different artisan studios in Europe and America.

The work of Racana-Weiler is the result of a bodily process, gestures are the result of a movement given by the body that acts on the support (canvas, paper etc.). Indeed her artworks show an ongoing relationship between body and living matter, they show the result of an evolving process, and are characterised by vibrant and bright colors that recall the redundant and scenographic baroque style. The relation with the raw matter and the importance of the process are elements extremely linked to artisanal production. Her xylography is, for example, a manifestation of the gesture that becomes an engraved sign, a muscular approach that penetrates and dissolves into the matter. As the artist affirmed in a conversation with Jim Dine: “my painting is like a living body but it’s not representational.”