It might be that someone out there still doesn’t recognise the varying features of his face—whether he has facial hair, the colours of his skin, its angles, whether his expression is serene, transparent or more like polarised glass. There will be people who won’t be able to tell his gender, his height, his weight, or how much space his substance takes up. They didn’t come across a physical mapping—nothing extraordinary really; just people who didn’t expect the exquisite possibility of observing all that is unimportant. David Oliver, however, knows about the substantial and the sacred: preserving intimacy and protecting sensibility. Grip Face is his subterfuge, his particular mask.

From early on, he understood art as a survival tool, leading to a multifaceted practice that constantly reexamines his symbolic universe. Painting, sculpture, installation and drawing form the foundation of a visual language inhabited by four recurring elements: the mirror, the hair, the mask and the costume. These symbols evoke memory, identity, protection, and desire. His meticulous, multilayered process constructs a metavisual world that moves between abstraction and figuration, digital and analog, offering a playful, introspective space to dissect the worries of a generation hungry for meaning.