Drawing occupies a central place in Olivier Cazenove’s multifaceted body of work. Though figurative, it often escapes its own codes, developing a singular visual language driven by exuberant, almost feral gestural energy. Scenes—everyday, erotic, or dreamlike—unfold in tangled bodies, grimacing masks, and unfinished chimeras.

Whether engraved on black rubber or expressed in Indian ink on paper, the line doubles back, coils, leans in, scatters, and gets lost… just like our gaze, tempted by the unruly, disorienting journey of a drawing always teetering on the edge of the uncontrollable.

His painting is just as unruly—an immense nebula where the artist’s waking dream takes over the material in all its forms and techniques. Here and there, bits of bodies, silhouettes, faces, expressions may emerge—only to vanish again within seemingly disparate compositions that together form the rich and vital fabric of Cazenove’s pictorial universe.

Fluid figures and dancing fragments are engulfed, softened by hazy, vibrating, impenetrable landscapes. Or, on the contrary, bodies, faces, and hallucinatory gazes rise to the surface in bold black outlines—trapping vivid colors, a geometric eye, a Picassoesque foot, a wild shock of jet-black hair.