Alain Clément
1941
(FRANCE)
FRENCH
Alain Clément is a French abstract painter whose works grow out of a lifelong exploration of color, lines, curves, physicality and space. Clément taught at the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier from 1970 until 1977. He began teaching at the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Nîmes in 1977, and was headmaster of the school from 1985 until 1990. He lives and works in Nîmes, southern France.
Education
Clément studied drawing at The Académie de la Grande Chaumière, an art school in the Montparnasse district of Paris, France, and learned engraving and printmaking at Atelier 17, an influential print workshop founded in Paris by the British Surrealist Stanley William Hayter.
Technique
Alain Clément’s practice is rooted in an exploration of color: sometimes color as volume, sometimes color as a lyrical expression of gesture, sometimes color as a graphic presence—always color as an element that is endowed with multiple meanings....
His work fluctuates between painting and sculpture, a back and forth that both results from, and contributes to, an ongoing exchange of ideas. The medium of painting offers Clément an arena in which gestural freedom, physicality, experimentation and immediacy can lead to the development of curved, graphic expressions of color and line, which may then be simplified and extended further into space as sculptural forms.
Whether they manifest on a two-dimensional plane in a free and physical way, like a dance, or as a three-dimensional volume, intricately planned, his compositions can be understood in terms of the visual relationships they express between color and space.
Inspiration
Coming of age as an artist in France in the 1960s, he was friends with members of the Supports/Surfaces movement. Though still not widely understood outside of France, this loosely defined group had in common a trust that painting was not yet exhausted, and could in fact be limitlessly expressed through simplicity and experimentation.
Throughout his career, Clément has continually explored the lyrical potential his mediums contain. He gives voice to an inexhaustible world of energy, color and space through his paintings and sculptures. Each of his works grows out of, and serves as a reminder of, the renewal he has found in the dialogue between experimentation and discovery.
Relevant Quotes
“I travel on my canvas space, like a dance.”
“My lines became more fluid, the forms more mobile; I was able to disengage the body from my painting and create a dance, a dance that no longer depicts the bodies of the dancers but the movement of the line, which I express in a constant back and forth between painting and sculpture.”
“I approach every painting with the hope of a color, everything revolves around the emergence of that color.”
Exhibitions & Collections
Clément has exhibited extensively, and his works are collected by several international public institutions, including Center Georges Pompidou, Paris, France, the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, France, the Museum of Art and History, Neuchâtel, Switzerland, the Kunst Museum, Düsseldorf, Germany, and many others.
Galleries
Baudoin-Lebon, Paris
Catherine Putman, Paris
Oniris, Rennes, France
Ready, Set, Paint! Performative Painting from IdeelArt
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