Oli Epp, Oxymoron, 2019

This poster was produced for Oli Epp’s 2020 solo exhibition ‘Oxymoron’ with Carl Kostyál in London.

Supervillains have captured Oli’s imagination for some of the same reasons they bring audiences to cinemas in numbers the heroes no longer seem responsible for. Manifest oxymoron, the supervillain is pointedly foolish for not seeing his vainglorious motives as villainy at all. But the villain isn’t merely the foil sent to suffer the retribution of the hero’s binary gauge of good and evil. Instead, in recent years, we’ve seen characters like Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker, whose insanity is presented as a reasonable response to a systemically chaotic and unjust world, in which uncertainty and anxiety reign. I mention this film in particular because I know Oli went to see it on three occasions during a time in which he felt personally and professionally wronged by some of the duplicitous characters that worm their way around the buying and selling of art. Because Oli wears his heart on his sleeve I have often watched and heard him learn things out loud and I think Oxymoron is an account of his coming to terms with the injustices that set reality and fiction apart. Paradoxically, however, in his paintings reality and fiction intermingle. In language an oxymoron looks fine at a glance but on closer inspection we realise two opposing ideas have been allowed to coexist. Oli’s non-Euclidean slips into Flatland are just like this, where, in terms of painting, the sense of order and hierarchy are upset, largely thanks to the epistemic challenges compounded by our digital lives.

Year: 2025
Size: 16.5 x 23.4 inches (42.0 x 59.4 cm)
Framed: Sold unframed