family business (2022) Digital Arts by Oli Romanelli (Olir)

More intuitive than elaborate, my photographic gaze, sharpened since my first reflex camera 30 years ago, is above all guided by the emotion of a moment. I had the chance to travel often, which allowed me to multiply these moments and thus feed a particularly eclectic photo library which I use mainly to create the background of my photomontages. And whether they are far away or made up of simple neighborhood wanderings, these journeys are an inexhaustible source from which poetry, magic and an alternative vision of reality sometimes spring unexpectedly.

I worked for many years in an associative environment dedicated to blindness, this led me to quickly become aware of the impact of images on understanding the world and on the difficulty of integrating today's society with a visual impairment. In a world where written information and knowledge are just a click away, it is now easy to browse it while staying at home... Among the innumerable sources to which we drink daily there remains a doubt about the objective reality of the words used by their author, our understanding being linked to our own history. If words sometimes tend to firmly channel our thoughts, a single image can sometimes liberate them, like a universal language that speaks to everyone's sensitivity rather than to their intellect. “To suggest is to create. To describe is to destroy” said Robert Doisneau. As a result, my photographic approach tries to follow this path, thus preferring suggestion rather than description.

For 3 years I have worked almost exclusively to write stories using photomontages, for myself or for others, and which are largely inspired by cinema, literature, painting or even music. It's a way of paying homage to works and/or artists that touched me.

• Nationality: FRANCE
• Date of birth : unknown date
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Contemporary French Artists