«What I really want to show is a perfect world with a crack in it. My job is to make the image attractive enough that people want to see the story I'm telling them, and then slap them.» 

With this quote, Erwin Olaf summarizes forty years of career in photography and video on the subject of disorder. Since the beginning, he has built a universe in a recognizable chromatic range with diffuse refinement. However, the second vision of his images, gives off a strange sensation from which a mystery arises, a boring anguish. He likes to play with this duality. For his double exhibition at the Museum of The Hague in 2019, he wanted to surprise the public with a photographic installation that combines sculptures and sounds. Portraits of sophisticated young women, male nudes, still lifes, and lonely children remain his favorite subjects. With an alternation of large and medium formats, the extremely careful prints bear witness to its strangely printed aesthetics for 40 years.

For his first collaboration with the Mexican gallery, Erwin Olaf, together with Patricia Conde, chose a selection of works highlighting his passion for art history and especially for the period of the golden age of Dutch painting. Reference to the classical painting of the great Dutch masters such as Vermeer and Pieter Claesz has embodied his photographic compositions since the beginning. It is important to remember how the artist takes his shots in the manner of his masters, fascinated by the light of Rembrandt's works and the precision of Claesz's vanitas. Like them, Erwin Olaf uses a dark background on which he puts a silky fabric to compose still lifes, vanities, or portraits. He does not hesitate to break the codes of the classic portraits that he observed during his multiple visits to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

The frontal portrait of the woman in the diadem with a diamond necklace adds another dimension to Olaf's story. He takes pleasure in defying the codes of the genre where the man traditionally symbolizes the warrior marked with wounds on his face. Here a mature woman takes on the role of the warrior, the dominatrix. Olaf does not hesitate to add iconographic elements attributed to the S&M medium that he often photographed in his early works. Through his portraits and still lifes, Erwin Olaf points out the current problems of Western societies such as the question of gender, discrimination, and religious abuse. We feel in the artist the constant imperative need to tackle the poisons of our contemporary societies to combat them better.

He started his career as an advertising photographer and knows the other side of the scene. Issues of power, the place of women in society, and loneliness continue to be entry points into his work. If his early subversive works made him known to an expert audience, his themes of feminine sophistication, male nudes, and portraits of children opened the doors to wider recognition.

For an ad campaign, he had fun revisiting Johannes Vermeer's iconic "Girl with the Pearl Earring" painting by having the model wear an oversized woolen hat, similar to the one worn by Jamaicans who hide their dreadlocks.

Nothing seems to stop the tireless Erwin Olaf in his introspective quest. He goes on voluntarily staging, as in this enigmatic self-portrait as a priest, leaving the interpretation to the viewer.

Beatrice Andrieux - Art Critic

Paris, February 2021