Jacco Olivier explores isolation and the human condition in new exhibition, Point Nemo
Jacco Olivier, Point Nemo, Acrylic on canvas, 285 x 215 cm, 2025.
AMSTERDAM.—
Galerie Ron Mandos will present the new solo exhibition Point Nemo by Dutch artist Jacco Olivier. The exhibition opens on Saturday, September 20, and runs through Sunday, October 26.
The exhibition brings together a series of new paintings and animations that reflect on isolation and the human search for meaning in life. How far and remote places can be; how we are sometimes bound to one place yet long in our minds for a horizon elsewhere. Olivier’s works move between these extremes: the urge to escape and the inevitable realization that one is always anchored somewhere.
The title refers to the most distant point on earth from any mainland: a place without an island, without a buoy, without a landmark. Only water. And yet, in Olivier’s imagination, a rock appears—a hold for thought, a place to land. He created four monumental paintings of this solitary rock in the sea, moving from daylight to dusk and night. A simple motif, but in Olivier’s hand a struggle on canvas that only finds balance through a single decisive stroke.
The large painting Point Nemo depicts a turbulent sea with a small rowboat, which introduces a human scale: a vulnerable figure in an immeasurable space. Olivier also created an animation of a rowboat navigating the waves. With this work, he references Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead. That painting, steeped in symbolism, depicts the passage into an unknown world: a journey to the dead, but also a metaphor for a transition into silence, calm, and a realm beyond the familiar.
In Thread, a boy carefully moves through a field of flowers. His contemporary, casual appearance and the title refer both to the thread he balances on, to the fragile connection between moments, and to a digital thread in which a story unfolds piece by piece.
In All Direction is Borrowed—a grid of 114 individually painted panels that together form an animation—a man presses and turns against a wall. The idea for this work arose from a familiar moment in the studio: that instant when you don’t know what to do next. The work captures that uncertainty, when the next step is unclear—a small homage to Bruce Nauman and to the artist’s search.
Point Nemo forms the counter-image to Olivier’s earlier exhibition Axis Mundi (2019), which revolved around the center of the world. Where Axis Mundi marked the midpoint, Point Nemo points to the outermost edge. A horizon as far away from the noise as possible, a place of radical isolation where one enters into dialogue with oneself. Perhaps Point Nemo is not only a coordinate in the ocean, but also an inner horizon: an island of calm in a sea of busyness.
