Colouring the darkness

Mud, acrylic on canvas, 2014. 

Fascinated by the work of Jung, Clément has always tried to picture archetypes rather than studying current affairs or portraying famous living figures.

From 2010, while a student at Les Ateliers de Sèvres and then at the National School of Fine Arts in Paris (Beaux-Arts), Clément starts to represent fundamental human experiences like birth, death, rebirth and the divine. He first depicts landscapes - valleys, mountains, wheat fields etc. - in an ambiguous way through his series Battlefieds.

In 2012 he paints the series of paintings Rituals using the archetypal figures of the Child, The Wise Old Man and the Shadow which represents the darkest parts of our psyche that we reject and repress : our unconscious fears, desires and impulses. This leads him to address the issue of night terrors. For this specific series, he chooses to embrace bright colors such as vivid mulberry, neon orange, vivid green and rare blue. Through these paintings his aim is to give the viewer a feeling of ease amidst the darkness of the themes.

In 2016, whilst studying mosaic at Beaux Arts de Paris, he achieves his first mosaic diptych called Plato’s Cave where Clément interrogates human beings’ path to knowledge, from ignorance, closeness and denial of reality to the access of the “outside world”, outside of their own mental caves.

Plato’s cave (2016) - Rituals (2012 - 2016) - Battlefields (2011-2014)