Photographs from Hector Olguin’s are immediately striking: on each picture, the body of a man or a woman, often in motion, sensual and/or mysterious, emerges more or less neatly from an explosion of vivid and contrasted colours. Blurriness, superimpositions, more or less identified props, more or less apparent faces and bodies, juxtapositions and blends of vibrant colours are mesmerising for the viewer who finds it hard to grasp at the same time all the aspects of the image. The eye is alternately attracted to the luminous detail (the golden nails of a model, the pink hat of another one); busy understanding the contents of the image (the rosebud man for example); curious about the technical conditions of the making of the image (the mermaid for example); fascinated with its composition (the girl with the flower bunch), with its contrasts (between the violence of vivid colours and the delicate quality of the gossamer textures), with the quantity of information it has to process (the model with fishnet stockings is a case in point). Torn between fascination and an effort to analyse the image, between passivity and activity, the viewer is above all destabilised by the discovery of an eccentric, even magical world.

Born in Santiago of Chile in 1970, he has lived in almost all the Latin-American countries (and had his work exhibited in Chile, Ecuador and Guatemala). In 2002, he moved to Paris. In France, he showed his work at the Palais de Tokyo (Hype Gallery project), in Nancy, during the 14th Biennale de l’image, at the Galerie Octobre, at the musée de Soues, and in the South of France at the Galerie Confluences in Nantes. He also lived and worked in Porto, Portugal, where he was offered a residency at the Palacio das Artes.

Text by Celine Mansati