Reaction

Reaction is a series of paintings and collages (turned into photographs) based on pages from a fashion magazine. The project has started on a single fashion magazine in 2017 but is still ongoing and has been expanding itself on other types of magazines.

About the artist:

Olivia Malena Vidal (1989) is a Swiss artist living and working in Geneva. She graduated from University in Geneva with a Master in Translation in 2015 and then studied Photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Her multilayered, interdisciplinary approach encompasses photography, painting, text, performance, video and sound.

She has a particular interest in the ways she can reflect on her own world of images through different media. Images from her past and present, such as family albums’ pictures, magazines, books and newspapers are taken out of their initial context and reused in the present. Some of these do not have a physical form, but belong to memory or the unconscious; they are obsessively searched, printed, and used in a new way. These collections come to constitute her personal archive, which is then torn up, shuffled and pasted, overlaid with paint, combined with other media or discussed through other media. This process of personal reappropriation serves to actualize the images, and turn them into a state of mind. It also allows her to produce new readings of her past, and re-experience it.

Olivia Malena Vidal’s work seeks to articulate this paradox whereby considering the old requires making it new. She does it through the use of photography, yet she systematically intervenes on this medium with another manual, gestural medium dependent on her body and mood. The fact that she sources her material from a personal archive aims to place her practice in a liminal space between conservation and creation, between curation and collage, demonstrating that the boundary between these notions is ultimately artificial.

GUP Magazine selected her as one of the 2017 New Dutch Photography Talent. She received the Experimental Film Award from the Amsterdam Film Festival for her short lm “The Lady on the bed” (2016), was shortlisted for the Athens Photo Festival and for the Artifact Prize 2018. In 2021, she received the Picto Prize for Fashion Photography (Dotation Filippo Roversi).

About the series:

Reaction is a series of paintings and collages based on pages from a fashion magazine. These magazine pages, on which my art is so to speak overlaid, were not selected or ‘curated’. Rather, they all come from one and the same volume which I picked randomly and engaged with at a fixed rate of one page per day from the first to the last. This ritualized practice was conceived as a form of exercise or training. I was made to rapidly respond to any kind of visual or textual form and appropriate it, each new page coming as a surprise. I saw myself as a karate fighter confronted with an adversary, who must react to any assault with a more powerful counter-attack of his own. The element I wanted to explore was not the blow in itself, but the counter-attack specifically. In other words, how my artistic personality reacts to the most eye-catching images of the everyday. It always struck me that creation is an anagram of reaction. Therefore reacting, perhaps, may be regarded as a creative form in itself.

My “reactions” to these pages is not an attempt to sublimate them, but rather to disquiet them. These images that, couched in shiny glazed paper and often retouched, epitomize aesthetic perfection. My interventions on them attacks this veneer by touching it, scraping it, and covering it with a thin crust — a crust which is my art. The supermodels receive a new layer of make-up on. Moreover, my approach is concerned with the question of how much time is spent looking at this kind of images. For most people flicking through a fashion magazine, the eyes will often linger less than a second on each page. By transforming these pages into my art, I hope to multiply this attention span by three, ten, even a hundred. The paradox behind this act is that I increase the visual longevity of these page as I obfuscate or altogether remove much of the information they carry. The project has been expanding itself on other magazines and is still ongoing.