The Hors d’œuvres exhibition by Oli Epp at the NTNU Art Museum in Taiwan presents a series of recent paintings, all created on the same canvas format. By placing the figures at the center of the composition and giving them emphasized gestures, the artist offers a gallery of sublimated and ethereal portraits.

A hallmark of Oli Epp’s style, the features of the figures are reduced to simple attributes, most often to the painted mouth. This very red mouth is a common symbol in the collective imagination of the second half of the 20th century, from the glamourous mouth of Marilyn Monroe to the Rolling Stones’ Tongue and Lips logo.

Several works in the series present immediate visual correspondences: the multiple necks of the Omen creature echo the three-legged cabaret figure in a black feather costume or the clown with four arms. These repetitions in the image create a clever system for displaying several attitudes in one. They also demonstrate Oli Epp’s interest in hybrid figures and the deliberate blurring of classifications between human, animal, and monstrous.

The accessories and objects scattered throughout the paintings function as symbols with metaphysical properties and metaphorical meanings. These works reconnect with the tradition of portraits with clues, where attributes are intended to shed light on personality. For example, in Sleepwalker, a silhouette in a long pink dress, fur collar, windswept hair, and string of pearls is accompanied by a lamb, a candle, a sleep mask, and a red signal light. In Golden Child, a stork carries a golden trash bag, followed by a passenger plane floating in its wake. Each painting offers a sophisticated game of visual semantics, like a riddle to be deciphered.

Oli Epp delivers a very smooth painting style, with flat, polished areas and blurred zones created with an airbrush. Light spreads in a surreal impression of a backlit screen. The graphic simplicity and seemingly easy decoding of the paintings mask a social satire of rare depth. Born in London in 1994, the artist belongs to a generation raised in a digital technology environment. While Oli Epp's painting is the product of our increasingly digitized experience of the world (Mara Hoberman), its caustic humor serves as the counterpoint and calls for a salutary distance from our modern excesses.