On the loose with Olivier Roller

“The first portrait I made was that of my grandfather. This face, already framed very tight and devoid of any artifice, embodied the only figure of fatherly authority that I knew then. For the first time, I went beyond portrait clichés: smile, stand up straight, look good! While a student in Political Science and Law, I abandoned these projects to turn to portrait photography. I had now found my language.

I needed faces. I then met many writers, filmmakers who were promoting their work. The press quickly ordered portraits from me, and for 15 years I worked for major European newspapers and magazines. I continued to show faces very closely. After a few years, I wanted to go beyond the communication framework in which my subjects were: one promoting a book or film, the other a reform. I then changed jobs: I became an artist.

I contact men of power, offering them to come and do a portrait in my studio, for nothing, to become an artistic object hung on the wall of an exhibition. Since 2009, I have been making a photographic fresco, seeking to describe the power and influence at the start of the XNUMXst century, by the individuals who compose it. Portraits where financial, advertising, intellectuals, diplomats and even Roman Emperors mingle.

In my exhibitions, the entire wall is made up of images, from floor to ceiling, where the men of power of the XNUMXst century come to confront the marble busts of the Roman Emperors. I bring contemporary and sometimes alive these sculpted pieces of stone where each break, scratch is the mirror of our wrinkles. "

Olivier Roller