Born in 1973 in Lorraine region (France), lives and works in Paris.

Graduate of the Metz Fine Arts School, Olivier Lounissi developed a polymorphic artistic practice (installation, video, 3D animation, drawing, painting, sculpture) exploring each medium's potentialities.

His first works questions the violence of social interactions, the perception of work and effort, the status of the artist in our society (Jeune Artiste (Young Artist), 1997, 35 heures d'un dur labeur (35 hours of hard labour), 2000, Numérique Building (Digital Building), 2001). Lounissi used from the onset, in his early work, his mastery of digital technology to underline its correlated stakes, limits and abuses: disconnection from reality, loss of marks, and apology of ultra-violence.

From 2006, this aptitude for new technologies served less a narrative than nourishing graphic design concerns: playing with perspective and rhythm, series and variations, form and pattern transformations in many of the artist's recent videos, such as La tragédie du petit voisin (the little neighbour's tragedy), 2006, Gauche droite, (Left right) 2007, Dentelle (Lace), 2008. In these assembled sequences, we can find optical games, which characterize his artwork, such as in his drawings Fractures, 2015. This series was imagined following an accident – indeed the artist's works are often inspired from own life events- and is staged through several mirrors, which reflect within each one of them the reverberating image of pain, and through them the haunting obsession of a wound. Reflections are also used in the serie Armada, to emphasize the multiple facets that drawn and folded bank notes can show, each reflection revealing a portrait and a new aspects of the note. Through this mechanism the artist successfully interrogates the concepts of vanity and narcissism through the monetary medium.

Olivier Louinissi undertakes a thorough formal research of images' perceptions through a decomposing/recomposing dialectic; the transformation from image to pixel, or pencil line, from unique item to an infinitely replicable one.

If it is true that the artist constantly relies on the most recent evolving technological advances (animation and 3D software for instance), his works rely nonetheless inherently on art history, in particular on the evolution of painting. Many of his works evoke game of shadows and illusions such as anamorphosis and “tableau vivant” in his works Jeune demoiselle au Louvre, Jeune orpheline au cimetière (Young damsel at the Louvre, Young orphan at the cemetery) which pay tribute to Delacroix.

Olivier Lounissi has also been obsessed since childhood by the mechanics of ancestral objects and artefacts such as measurement tools and immemorial apparatuses developed by mankind throughout History. The mechanised sculpture Sablier d'Or, 2017, exhibited at the Mucem in Marseille is filled with ancestral imagery, in which science, craftsmanship and artistry meet.

OLIVIER LOUNISSI

Born in 1973 in Lorraine
Lives and works in Paris

June - July 2019
Solo Show "Olivier Lounissi, Armada", Private Bank CIC, Nancy, France
Curator : Laetitia Thomas

March - April 2019
Group Show "Métiers d'art, Signatures des territoires", Galerie des Gobelins, Paris, France
Curator : Henri Jobbé-Duval

April - September 2018
Group Show "Or", MUCEM, Marseille, France
Curators : Jean-Roch Bouiller, Philippe Jockey, Myriame Morel-Deledalle, Marcel Tavé

February - April 2016
Solo Show "Dessins en-quête de guérison", 12 coloured pencil drawings on paper and mirror
Saint-Séverin Gallery, Paris, France
Curator : Yves Sabourin

October 2012
Group Show "Nuit Blanche", Paris, France
Curator : Laurent Le Bon

September - November 2009
Group Show "Portraits de chaussures - Histoire de pieds", Sungkok Art Museum, Seoul, Korea

July - August 2009
Group Show "Portraits de chaussures - Histoire de pieds", Thailand Design & Creative Center, Bangkok, Thailand

June - August 2009
Group Show "Pol/A", Nivet-Carzon Gallery, Paris, France

May - June 2009
Group Show "Portraits de chaussures - Histoire de pieds", Ayala Museum, Manille, Philippines

October 2008
Group Show "Nuit Blanche", Metz, France

May - June 2008
Group Show "Installations - Vidéos", French Institute, Fine Arts University, ANKARA, Turkey
Curator : Marcel Tavé
GAUCHE DROITE…, video on DVD, 1 mn 14 s, December 2007
NUMERIQUE BUILDING 2001, 3D animation, 4 mn on DVD, October 2001
Jeune ARTISTE, video on DVD, 15 mn, October 1997
GAUCHE DROITE…Défiler, vidéo on DVD, 1 mn 14 s, December 2007
La tragédie du petit voisin, video in loop, 1 mn, on DVD, January 2006
Jeune demoiselle au Louvre, Jeune orpheline au cimetière, video on DVD, May 1999

January - February 2008
Group Show Art Price Robert Schuman, modern art Museum in Trèves, Germany

May 2006 - March 2007
Residency in Berlin, Germany

May 2005
Public order, Hôtel de Police, Thionville, France

May 2004
Group Show "Faux Mouvement", Metz, France
Curator : Maryse Jeanguyot

October 2003
Group Show "Nuit Blanche", Paris, France

May 2003
Group Show "NORAPOLIS", Saint-Pierre aux Nonnains's Church, Metz, France
Curator : Mario Salis

December 2002
Group Show "La Nuit Art Vidéo", Le Forum itinérant, Strasbourg, France

September 2002
Group Show "Biotechnobody", la BF15, Lyon, France

October 2001- January 2003
Group Show "L'homme Transformé", Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie, Paris, France
Curator : Joël de Rosnay

January 2001
Group Show "Biozones, F.D.A.C 93", Paris, France

January 2000
Group Show "Le Phare", Porte de Versailles, Paris, France

December 1999
Group Show "Mon Beau Sapin", Area Gallery, Paris, France

December 1998
Group Show "7A928", Paris, France
Curator : Nathalie Travers

November - December 1998
Group Show "Faux Mouvement", Metz, France
Curator : Maryse Jeanguyot

March 1997
Group Show "Échos", Oeil Gallery, Metz, France
Curator : Monique Auburtin

1997
Graduate of the Fine Arts School of Metz, France