Oliver Laric

At first sight Oliver Laric´s oeuvre appears to be oriented towards the contemporary perpetuation of traditional sculpture. One of his long-term projects is the website threedscans.com where he posts digital scans of sculptures and objects for which the copyright has expired. As a result, everyone can use the scans of the original image and print them out in 3D. However, his practice is more complex.

Laric seeks new forms of hybridity and variation that emerge during the distribution of objects and images. He seeks to escape from the rigid terms that define the idea of authenticity and authorship and looks at creations that are made in the grey zones of interpretation. ´Morphing´, the physical transformation that a character goes through, is a recurrent theme in his videos, installations and sculptures. The calculations of a computer algorithm ensure a flowing transition and countless new designs can be created.

In Middelkerke, Metamorphosis shows the transformation from a normal toad, or European toad, to a table. Laric thoroughly unravels this transformation. Each phase of transformation is an image in itself, of equal weight and importance. Laric is interested here in the idea of identity and its complexity and ambiguity. Throughout history, the borders between man and woman, animal and human being, have been clearly delimited. In various cultures undefined, grey zones are were regarded as the zone where monsters are born, such as in Ovid’s Latin poem The Metamorphosesdating from 8 AD. Laric, by contrast, is looking precisely for the non-binary, for porous borders and transformations. In his works, many human and non-human forms appear intertwined with one another, which explicitly undo the superiority of the human. By depicting new figures that are less defined by categories, Laric makes room for a new relationship of mutual dependency, which explicitly undo the superiority of the human.