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. This will be the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. 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.

As the pandemic tethers us close to home, Calgary-born Erik Olson has unveiled a travelogue three years in the making of his 10,000-mile motorcycle odyssey through the storied places and dysfunctional underbelly of the United States.

The exhibition opens with a rapid, stand-alone animation that displays 19 images at a speed evoking the highway, testing our powers of perception and suggesting that the story of the journey could be told entirely visually, as if by Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, who avoided scripted narration. The first sets the bike against an expanse of sky and sea near Vancouver, recalling Arthur Rimbaud’s discovery of “eternity” in the sea merged with the sun.

On the canvases, we find a reflection of contemporary America, from the hypnotic beauty of the landscape to the exuberant music on the streets to the struggles of those at the margins. All this comes through exquisitely in the forceful colours and spirited brushwork for which Olson has become well known. 

Olson, who offers portraits of Mars, Saturn, Uranus, Pluto and Charon, Mercury, Venus and a violently erupting quasar, among others, admits his knowledge of the cosmos was somewhat limited at first. But he became fascinated not only with the science-based observational data but also the naming of them in Greek and Roman mythology.

An exhibition of new works by an internationally acclaimed Canadian artist was inspired by a motorcycle trek across North America.

There's something invigorating about Erik Olson's rough-hewn artistry. He's known for his portraits, faces jagged and disintegrating in gooey slashes of colour. But his latest body of work, one of his self-described tangents, focuses on trees. Including unabashedly jerry-built tree houses - with what might be called a faux-naif style, except that it feels too genuine. The results are exuberant, childlike and intriguing. 

For the last couple of years Canadian artist Erik Olson has been working almost exculsively on portraiture works, developing a wider range of representations of the individual. During his recent, highly productive stay at The La Brea Residency in LA, he created a new series of large oils on canvas as well as smaller oils on paper, further experimenting with the traditional format.