This painting is inspired by a print by the Japanese artist Hiroshige, Lake Hakone (1833). This engraving represents the 10th stage of a route between Kyoto and Tokyo. Captivated by this landscape, structured in bright colors, Olivier Robert wonders how he can appropriate this fascinating place without actually visiting it. To achieve this, he decides to replace each colored surface with a fragment of a photograph from his own holiday photo album. The images are selected based on shape, color, or both.
In the end, while the outlines and colors of the landscape are mostly preserved, the content becomes disordered: foreground and background blend together, textures repeat, and elements overlap.
In a world shifting from disposable to recyclable, Olivier Robert continuously seeks to reinvest in old photographs, extracting new information to evolve his experience. Noticing that his own holiday memories have been reshaped, mixed, and sometimes even nearly invented, he plays with the idea of representing both "here" and "elsewhere" within the same canvas—just as the human brain constantly generates plausible reconstructions to fill in the gaps of memory.
By intertwining different levels of representation, Olivier Robert creates a “bipolar” landscape. By integrating photographs from Portmeirion—a village entirely conceived and constructed according to an architect’s idealized vision—into Hiroshige’s composition, this painting challenges the boundaries between authenticity and fiction. It reveals how both places, though distant in time and space, originate from imagined worlds and reinterpreted realities.
