ERWIN OLAF : Rain, Hope, Grief, Hotel, a selection from the early series

As part of the Extended Program of EXPOSED, the month of photography in Turin, the metroquadro gallery remembers the recently deceased photographer Erwin Olaf with a selection of photographs from his first four series:

Rain (2004), Hope (2005), Grief (2007) and Hotel (2010).

Portraits in glimpses of interiors, suspended moments that suggest unfathomable inner vistas. One of the gallery rooms is dedicated to Erwin Olaf; in the remaining two, the exhibition: Shinya Sakurai “marks and traces.

Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf has straddled the worlds of art, advertising, and fashion photography with a sumptuous cinematic and painterly aesthetic. In his meticulously staged works, he introduced subtle imperfections to provoke disquiet in his audiences, “There should be an enigma in every powerful image, intriguing you and inviting you to look again and again.”

He was influenced by the narrative power of cinema and the emotion it can provoke. His photographs are a narrative presented in one shot, to capture the moment between what has just happened and what is about to happen. In 2014 he said, “I wanted to conquer the world with strong images, but nowadays I want to say to the viewer: I’ll give you the ingredients, you make the story.”

In front of his photographs, one is immersed in muffled atmospheres inspired by the 1950s and 1960s, in which quotes from great masters of Italian cinema such as Pasolini, Visconti, and Fellini emerge. It is not so much nostalgia that interests Olaf, or the regret of a time gone by, but rather the aesthetics of an era capable of expressing the complexity of the human soul in a profound, attractive and sensual way, exploring even its most hidden sides through an anthology of beauty.