Past Exhibitions

Oliver Clegg

Berceuse


January 15 - February 19, 2011

Press Release

British artist Oliver Clegg (b 1980) has gained a rep­u­ta­tion as a multi-faceted artist whose metic­u­lously exe­cuted works hover between two and three-dimen­sional dis­cip­lines. A mas­terful draugh­ts­man and skilled painter, Clegg para­doxi­cally one of the most con­ceptu­ally minded young artists working today, engag­ing with lan­guage, narra­tive and mem­ory and draw­ing from symbol­ism and surre­al­ism in his practice.

Playing as he likes to with words in differ­ent lan­guages, Clegg found him­self return­ing time and again to: ’berceuse’, the French for lullaby. The word became the gen­e­sis for a new body of work and the title for the artist’s first solo show in Berlin. Clegg was struck by the onomatopoeic qual­ity of ‘berceuse’; the way it mim­ics the sooth­ing sound of a par­ent coaxing their child into dream­land. Dreams are sig­nif­icant to the artist as a means for cre­at­ing a space that seems half way between the real and the surreal. And indeed the surre­al­ist notion of ’the harmony of dis­harmo­nious ele­ments’ is keenly important to him and evi­dent in this exhi­bi­tion. By includ­ing objects that have strong symbolic mean­ings but that appear to be behav­ing in ways only comprehensi­ble in this dream world, the artist can introduce a playful ele­ment into his work.

Play is a motif that has run through­out Clegg’s practice to date, as exempli­fied by his paint­ings of dis­carded toys, exe­cuted on found draw­ing boards. The objects speak of pri­vate nos­tal­gias but evoke commonly held expe­r­i­ences of the moment when the child ’gives up’ a treasured blan­ket or toy. Though it is the object that dis­ap­pears, often far more is lost. In his essay, ’Cre­ative Writ­ers and the Daydream’, Freud states that though the fantasy world of child­hood is lost to grown ups, it can be kept alive by writ­ers and artists in their work. This is of key importance to Clegg.

Clegg is sensi­tive to the sig­nif­icance of ordinary objects, transformed in the hands of a writer or an artist. This act of recycling began when Clegg was still at art school. He col­lected old draw­ing boards, prizing them for their scratch­ings and doo­dles. Clegg likes the fact these come with their own unique histo­ries that relate to some­body else’s life. Emo­tive objects such as a diary or well-thumbed book, a school desk, blan­ket box, chess-set or even floorboards from a de-con­se­crated church, acquire a noble qual­ity in Clegg’s hands. By working with these artefacts, Clegg allows the viewer to wan­der between narra­tives and worlds, unit­ing extant ref­er­ences with new images, or cre­at­ing entirely new ones, recall­ing Duchamp: ’it is the onlook­ers who make the pic­tures’.

For this exhi­bi­tion Clegg has produced seven new paint­ings and a sculp­ture. The show com­mences with ’Begin’ a woo­den cra­dle with its title carved into its bot­tom. The cra­dle is symbolic of the start of life’s jour­ney and, thus its asso­cia­tion with death as well as with life, is unavoid­able. An empty cra­dle is also sug­ges­tive of the child hav­ing grown up. Once it was lulled by its mother to sleep, but now as it moves through child­hood, it must set­tle itself, the night no longer offer­ing a welcome escape from the day, instead bring­ing an onslaught of dreams.

‘Think of Me’ depicts a dou­ble self-por­trait of the seated artist viewed from behind. He appears to be looking in a mirror, yet sees not his reflec­tion but the view the observer is confronted with: the back of his head, thus call­ing into ques­tion the artist’s sense of identity. The work is clearly a homage to Magritte but by Clegg paint­ing the image on an assem­blage of found mirrors it is as if he is being judged against the oth­ers who have looked in these mirrors before him; the work is preg­nant with the artist’s sense of emo­tional conflict, and with the dreams and every­day con­cerns of all those who have peered into the mirrors.

The Ger­man word ‘Zugzwang’ is an interna­tional chess term mean­ing ’you have to make a move’. With his use of chiaroscuro and the pos­ing of the fig­ure in a manner typ­ical of the Ital­ian Baroque, Clegg’s self por­trait is both intrigu­ing and sensu­ous. Painted on the back of four­teen found chess boards, an already loaded surface, the work der­ives from the premise of conflict: in this case between tragedy and com­edy, as attested by the pres­ence of the two masks. Each board has seen many games so it is pos­si­ble to think about this work as the sum of the energy of mul­ti­ple minds while simulta­ne­ously reflect­ing the warring emo­tions of the artist.

The title ‘In Words Drown I’ is a palindrome, it spells the same backwards as well as forwards. The paint­ing fea­tures a girl reach­ing out to her sleep­ing self. The depicted scene recalls an exam­ple of reflexive vision given by the phe­nome­nol­o­gist, Mau­rice Merleau-Ponty. He chal­lenged Descartes’ claim that because the world is external to the artist, in order to know it, the artist attempts to recre­ate it. This argu­ment of Descartes gave art history a rep­re­senta­tion­al­ist under­stand­ing of vision and art. Merleau-Ponty chal­lenged this view by claim­ing that because the artist moves through the world at the same time as looking at it, the world cannot be external to him: he sees both the world - and him­self in that world. Merleau-Ponty illus­trates his argu­ment through the use of the fol­low­ing para­doxi­cal anal­ogy: if I touch myself, I am both touch­ing and being touched; but both actions are expe­r­i­enced by me. In the case of Clegg’s paint­ing, the sub­ject is reach­ing out to her sleep­ing self, the con­scious mind sink­ing, or ‘drown­ing’ in the sub-con­scious.

Clegg enjoys word games and ‘Piano Forte’, painted on a dis­man­tled piano, is one such exam­ple. Though the title describes the phys­ical essence of the piano, the words also mean ‘soft’ and ‘strong’; per­haps another ref­er­ence to the dichotomy of the self who finds him­self divided between what he thinks and feels and what he can actu­ally express.

The paint­ings ‘I’ and ‘II’, fea­ture iso­lated, domes­tic objects: a float­ing pil­low and a float­ing chair, painted on floorboards recov­ered from a demol­ished church. The fact the chair in ‘II’ is float­ing sug­gests it has transcended its normal func­tion and gained a sen­ti­mental, even spir­i­tual dimen­sion. Maybe this chair was once asso­ciated with a par­tic­u­lar owner and is thus imbued with sen­ti­mental sig­nif­icance. That objects can be pow­erfully emo­tive sig­ni­fiers is no surprise but the added compo­nent of the objects float­ing is perturb­ing, sug­ges­tive even of the ascen­sion of the spirit. Again Clegg pre­sents the viewer with a conundrum: the chair is an object asso­ciated with ground­ing the human in earthly space. The pil­low in ’I’ on the other hand has an aer­ial qual­ity. Clegg has identi­fied two of the most essen­tial objects asso­ciated with help­ing the human through day and night. That the chair is another symbol of the con­scious mind, and the pil­low of the sub­con­scious, is per­haps delib­er­ately unclear, the viewer being again reminded of Duchamp’s phrase con­cern­ing his role in the pro­cess of looking at art.

‘Plato is a Bore’ con­cludes the exhi­bi­tion. The work con­sists of a dan­gling pup­pet painted on a dis­man­tled Edwar­dian school desk. The pup­pet reminds Clegg of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave which describes a group of people who have been chained to the walls of a cave all their lives. Shad­ows are cast on the walls by people out­side the cave walking by, and over time the cave’s inhab­i­tants ascribe forms to these shad­ows. It is not until one of the people is freed from the cave that he realises the shad­ows do not con­stitute real­ity at all, merely a pup­pet the­atre ver­sion of it. Plato’s anal­ogy was intended to explain the importance of knowl­edge gov­ern­ing sen­sa­tion. Clegg’s hang­ing pup­pet serves to remind the viewer that expe­r­i­ence needs to be accompa­nied by knowl­edge. The title of this piece could well have been scrawled on the desk itself by a bored schoolboy who has not yet emerged from ‘the cave’.

Oliver Clegg lives and works in Cornwall and London.

Jane Neal

For more information and images, please visit Nolan Judin Berlin's website.

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