Olivier Ratsi, who joined the label this year, has a long background in photography and graphic design, and his still creations have been featured in many french magazines and publications, such as Rexorama, Sonomag, and the covers of MCD guide or Etapes.
He just been commissioned by the New York Times to produce one creation for their “T” Logo series. The result is a full page in the paper version of the NYT style magazine, with 2 millions copies edited worldwide.
I meant to introduce you properly to Olivier for a while, but our busy planning has delayed my plans for far too long..
If you are interested in live visuals, you probably heard about Olivier’s work before, as the man is one of the most demanded VJs in Europe, and he performed in many festivals (Festival Optronica, Mapping, Nemo, Exit, Centre George Pompidou, etc) under his VJ name EMovie. I presented his work a couple of times on this blog, in the Paysages electroniques 07 report, or after Nordik impact, at the time we were tracing the first lines of the Label project.
I discovered Olivier’s work a couple of years ago, and I’ve been instantly convinced by his visual style and his artistic statement. Unlike many VJs, all his content is created around a main theme, a research on the time and space dimensions, fragments and deconstruction, and you can find some very interesting meanings behind his pretty images.
Olivier applies his ‘time & space’ fragmentation technique on different subjects (simple shapes, urban and land scapes, and more abstract textures) and several mediums, such as photography (check his Anarchitecture series), graphic design (he worked with the cult Parisian ‘Rex club’ for many years), live visuals (multiprojection and unusual formats), and more recently he’s been exploring installation work..
So we met several times with Olivier, and each time we realized that we were sharing the same interests and aim in our work (also with Yannick Jacquet and Romain Tardy): step away from the usual projections screens and formats, explore projections in 3D spaces and study visual perception, and the classical but fascinating ‘time/space’ subject.