Picturing the lonely crowd

Flocons, Winter is coming ?, acrylic, pastels and ink on paper, 2017

One of Clement’s obsessions is the notion of identity. As described in the analysis conducted by David Riesman, Nathan Glazer and Ruel Denney in The Lonely Crowd, Clement first painted individuals that were “inner-directed”. These are people who have discovered their own internal potential to live and act not on societal norms but on their own “psychological compass”.

In 2015, he questions existence through the series of paintings Purgatory depicting motionless or wandering groups, some paying Charon, the mythological smuggler, for an easier passage and others unable to follow the light in front of them. 

From 2015 to 2016, at the peek of the European migration crisis, he paints people in exile, in danger, in search of identities lost at sea while wandering aimlessly. The European media landscape prompts him to create the series No Man’s Land and Winter is Coming ?, alluding to the hysteria of Game of Thrones characters preoccupied with an invisible and fatal enemy, the white walkers, while their own kingdoms are filled with lethal leaders.

From 2017 to 2018, he begins browsing the databases of the Ellis Island Immigration Center and the Second World War looking for faces of war refugees. This leads him to create the mixed media series Cartography of the Exodus where he tries, juxtaposing faces of refugees, to map the multiple identities of these lonely crowds in search of a better life.

Motionless Nomads (2018-2019) - Cartographie of the Exodus - No Man’s Land - Winter is coming ? (2017 - 2019) - Corpus Mons (2018) - Purgatory (2016)