Purple Diary
[December 3 2009]
My first photo exhibition, at Half Gallery, december 1/january 2, 2010 New York. Photo Olivier Zahm
Olivier Zahm of Purple will present his first exhibition in the Lower East Side at Half Gallery. Spending his time between New York and Paris, the man behind Purple Fashion magazine has published, in Purple Diary, pictures that read like a guide to some of his favourite places : the Montana, the brasserie Lipp, and the Café de Flore in Paris, Standard hotel and the Omen restaurant, among many others, in NYC. His diary develops an imagery which transcends the original magazine. Thanks to the new digital support, Zahm’s life is now the very material of this new medium. In this sense, his site is like some sort of immaterial ID card of the artist, as it chronologically reveals what he is producing and with who, as well as the creative process at work. Through the representation of a specific microsom and its codes, he paints a dense social fresco, a fictional document appropriate to the end of the 00s. Always navigating between private sphere and public sphere, he’s purposely getting us lost through a maze of multiple indications that only reveal the surface, elegant and opaque. It all leads to his obessional paths : bodies of naked and tantalizing women, socialite life, architecture and contemporary still lifes.
An autofictional picture as a matter of fact, disclosing a form of romanticism and mania that show as much in his luxurious approach to aesthetics as in his view on intimacy.
Text bt Pierre-Alexandre M from the excellent art blog Geometrie Variable
