ERIK OLSON The Mountain and the Sea

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce ERIK OLSON: The Mountain and the Sea, a new series of striking and expressive landscape paintings, on view from June 17 - August 5, 2023. This will be the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. An artist reception and exhibition walk-through, led by the artist, will be held on Saturday, July 8, 5-8 PM.

Calgary-based artist Erik Olson is known for his imaginative and innovative approach to painting. Recognized for his powerful portraiture as well as his deeply personal explorations of landscape and color, his work utilizes scale to express the larger context of the human experience.

In The Mountain and the Sea, Olson presents seven, six-foot studio paintings which translate, expand and complement 40 small en plein air paintings that he ambitiously composed during his months-long project in Southern Spain. The series brings to life the emotional and psychological relationship—a deep appreciation and connectedness with nature—that evolved between the artist and his engagement with the land during daily hikes from the seaside up into the mountains of Andalusia. Olson has been developing this body of work since his initial trip to the region in 2021. Additionally, eight black and white dry point etchings are included in the project.

The complex terrain, vegetation, and color of the mountain landscapes spilling into the sea provides a natural atelier, one deeply etched by geological and human history. This landscape, undergoing constant metamorphosis, conflict, and renewal over the ages, is arrested in experiential images of the present in Olson's paintings. The series celebrates the essence of the natural environment, removing constraints of space and time to capture the diversity of the Mediterranean climate, flora and fauna, which bears a striking resemblance to the dramatic and rugged landscape of California.

Olson creates textures through his use of bold impasto and watercolor-like turpentine washes. The use of conflicting mark making techniques are a testament to Olson’s direct engagement with the landscape, intertwined with a profoundly personal understanding of color and brushwork. His commitment to the quick, light and loose brush strokes of historical plein air paintings is an attribute of the series and expresses the spontaneity of the artist’s impulses and the spirit of plein air painting.