Oliver Osborne’s paintings function together as a sort of slightly uncomfortable language with its own visual grammar. The juxtaposition of images creates the same sort of puzzlement we encounter when trying to comprehend and master foreign languages. The artist has said, “I like to think of painting, and oil painting in particular, as a technology that I can use to produce images. It’s a technology that is flexible, crude and technical. The fascinating diversity in its recent history (from Ingres to Krebber perhaps) gives huge scope to painters today […] I’m often trying to figure out orthodoxy, which in painting is actually very hard to pinpoint.”

Osborne’s paintings include found images of cartoons paired with monochrome panels, as well as smaller naturalistic images representing the same orange jar or rubber plants viewed from different angles. These two types of paintings could be interpreted as diverging in manner or technique, yet they both denote an interest in the way images function as a grammar even when they are stripped of language. The cartoons are taken out of their original context–the language textbooks they were appropriated from, their speech bubbles and legends removed, their situational meaning now rendered unintelligible–to meet another “found” tradition in the history of painting, the monochrome. All painting is a found language to some extent, and abstract or figurative distinctions are collapsed; monochrome painting is more “representational” than still life painting.

Osborne has had solo exhibitions at Vilma Gold in London, Frutta in Rome, and Peles Empire in London. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Pace Gallery in London, Saatchi Gallery in London, Autocenter in Berlin, and the ICA in London, among other venues.

Courtesy of Galerie Catherine Bastide