Comic art by Alexis Olin.
Alexis Olin is a Ukrainian artist and photographer, also known as Darklunni. Between 1999 and 2009, he was active as a comic artist, most notably as editor-in-chief of the anthology magazine K9. He is the owner of the Métrique clothing brand.
Influences
Alexis Olin (also written as Alexei Olin or Алексей Олин) was born in Kyiv. Since 1995, his regular visits to France have left a huge impact on his art and photography. Important influences on his comic art have been Moebius, Katsuhiro Otomo and Hayao Miyazaki. For his fine art, he has found inspiration in Renaissance painters like Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Rafael, the Baroque painters Diego Velasquez and Johannes Vermeer, as well as Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Gerhard Richter and the contemporary artists James Jean and Erik Jones.
'Wzrosli'.
Comics
As an artist, Olin has been active in several fields, including painting, photography and clothing production. Between 1999 and 2009, he first made his mark as a comic artist, starting with publication of his series 'The Trainmen' in the X3M magazine. Over the next ten years, his comic art appeared in several Ukrainian cult comic magazines, such as Extreme, Moloko and K9. Between 2001 and 2009, he was project coordinator and editor-in-chief of the alternative comic magazine K9, which specialized in comics and manga. During its run, K9 printed comics by Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, Czech, American, French, Swiss, Belgian and Italian comic creators, and also featured columns about movies and anime, interviews with well-known comic authors and other background articles.
The K9 team participated in international comic festivals in Ukraine, Poland and France, and was prize-winner in the national exhibition of Youth Press in Ukraine. In 2005, Alexis Olin was organizer of the 9 World International Festival of Graphic Novels and Comics at the Kyiv Planetarium. In 2008, he hosted another year of the event at the Lavra art gallery in Kyiv. In between, in 2006, Olin was on the jury of the 33rd Angoulême International Comics Festival in Angoulême, France.
Comic art by Alexis Olin.
Other art activities
Since 2010, Olin has been mainly exploring other art forms, although working with brushes on canvas and a digital pen on the computer have remained a priority. As a painter, he has shown his work in many collective and solo exhibitions. In 2016, he created the Métrique clothing brand, which has given him the ability to display his paintings on clothing fabrics. In the following year, Olin also turned to 35mm portrait photography on film cameras, and has had several personal photo exhibitions.
Since 2021, Alexis Olin has been paying attention to NFTs, the digital identifiers that allow people to have unique ownership of digital files. His work can be found on digital art online auction platforms for non-fungible token art such as SuperRare, Foundation, Nifty Gateway, OpenSea and Objkt. Among his favorite NFT artists are Victor Mosquera, Daniel Taylor and Mr Misang.
Alexis Olin in 2016.