Sam Van Olffen is a multifariously talented individual. I first came across his work at Dark Roasted Blend, a blog that features all sorts of weird and wonderful things, one of them being the work of Van Olffen. Based in Montpelier in the South of France, Van Olffen describes himself as a 'Graphic Sampler', known for taking photos of everyday places and objects, and utilising them in new and futuristically surreal situations and surroundings that one feels transported to a parallel reality, or perhaps a dystopian perspective of our own at the very least!

I myself am a big fan of precise photo-montage, which is essentially a posh word for collage, however there is an important distinction. There are collage artists, usually painters who like to work with mixed-media. The printed page from a glossy magazine might provide an interesting texture for a mountainside, an eye from a close-up fashion photo of a model could provide an interesting Cubist slant to an otherwise pedestrian painting, a torn poster of a city skyline can save a lot of time when preparing a background, but collage will always play second fiddle to many painters out there. Photo Montage is the antithesis of collage in everything but the medium. When one splices a photographic image with another one is making a statement regardless of the subject at hand. The world has lived under the myth that seeing is believing for many many centuries past, the invention of photography most certainly solidified this perceptual belief system, however with the advancement of other sciences and most recently the digitisation of the image itself, we live in a time of a tolerance for a new reality, a surreality. A reality placed upon another, enacting the role of surface, yet that surface is false, it is a false signifier, a fake representation of our own, in truth a hyperreality.

This is, for the main part, where I believe Sam Van Olffen's mind wanders, this is his landscape, it is flavoured with his own personal perceptions, driven by hs own emotional and psychological needs, yet the medium, method and precision of each finished piece connects with his audience on a deeper level, a subconscious array of primal fears, distorted beyond recognition by the notions of time travel, invention without reason and life itself as little more than commodity.

The fear of an ecological collapse is ever present in his work, often his subjects sport gas masks, be it in war, as entertainers, or even in one example a wedding party. The vast paleo future visions of sci-fi writers, architectural visionaries, imaginative engineers and artists of the past all contribute to the setting for each work, be it literally through graphic reference, such as Modernist corporate architecture and manufactured objects and machines seen as futuristic in their time, or through simply their cultural influence and ideology of a time yet not apparent, obfuscated by the habits and diktats of their own age. This is most apparent in his characters' clothing, much of it appearing to range between the Edwardian era and WW2.

Van Olffen's work performs the same function as all good sci-fi literature does, it provides a mental space to consider the immediate without immediate consequence, an avenue of questioning and understanding that denies the distraction of the now in order to seek a greater relativity, a knowing beyond either the individual or their peers. This cocoon of time and space 'protects' the viewer from their own impulses and instinctual fears, they are free to roam through the post-apocalypse, and even grow to admire the survivors' tenacity and perseverance.

See more of Sam Van Olffen's 'graphic samplings' at his blog at www.vanolffen.blogspot.com.

This post is tagged collage, photo montage, photography, Sam Van Olffen, sci-fi, Steam Punk, Van Olffen