Thresholds: The Art of Olivier J.LW
Olivier J.L.W. is a multidisciplinary artist and musician whose work inhabits the liminal space between the physical and the metaphysical. Born in Western Europe in the early 1980s and now based in the south of France, his practice merges painting, sound, and experimental media into a singular, immersive vision. Through rich layers of gesture, symbolism, and abstraction, Olivier invites viewers into shifting worlds where identity, memory, and the unseen become palpable.
His visual language is deeply informed by personal experience—particularly his story as an adoptee—and shaped by early fascinations with biology, natural systems, and the realms of esoteric readings. His work does not seek to depict reality, but to uncover its deeper resonances: what lives beneath the surface, what haunts the flesh, and what dissolves as it transforms.
In his current series—OTHER, Dream Mechanics, and In Tenebris Terrae—Olivier explores themes of embodiment, impermanence, and inner mythologies. OTHER is a reflection on haunting absence and erotic metamorphosis; Dream Mechanics visualizes the visceral architecture of dreams and the subtle circuitry of the subconscious; and In Tenebris Terrae dwells in a shadowed world of disintegration, where beings are stripped of form and ego in a slow passage toward rebirth.
These works are not illustrations but thresholds—images that exist in a state of becoming. Bodies blur and reassemble, eroticism is present without spectacle, and flesh becomes a site of spiritual transmission. His palette often evokes living tissue, wounds, or sacred interiors, treating color as an emotional and symbolic code.
Musically, Olivier is the co-founder of the Belgian black metal band EMPTINESS, known for its eerie compositions and its uncompromising position within the underground scene. The band has forged a unique identity over the years, blending rawness and atmosphere into a sound that is as unsettling as it is immersive. Olivier’s approach to music parallels his visual work: layered, instinctive, and emotionally charged. His sonic practice—built from guitars, synthesizers, and analog effects—searches, like his paintings, for the threshold where feeling overtakes form.
At the heart of Olivier J.LW’s work lies a persistent question: how do we render the invisible? In painting, in sound, in the porous boundaries of self, he seeks not answers—but presences.
To accompany the viewing of this work, the track “Redamancy” is offered as a sonic thread—an atmosphere to inhabit while reading and contemplating. Let it open a door, or dissolve one.
