Now, I live here
From 07/10/2021 To 15/01/2022
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DANIEL CLARKE
Daniel Clarke, an American artist with Irish origins, has chosen France for many years to live and work. He is delighted to be exhibiting at the gallery from 16 September for six weeks. A wide range of his work will be presented, in painting and woodcarving, some works dating from 2017 and others more recent. The compositions of characters and objects in which family memories and Irish history are intertwined, halfway between the figurative and the abstract, highlight the recent evolution of Daniel Clarke's work. He has embarked on a journey backwards, not to America or further afield, but exploring an uncertain path, as the horizon sometimes seems to slip away, from the visual narrative to the ineffable interiority. His work, with its vibrant colours, moving because he knows how to capture in certain details what goes straight to our heart, is to be discovered for the first time in Nice.
Galerie 21Contemporary is pleased to present its new exhibition entitled "Now I live Here", devoted to the American artist Daniel Clarke and his polymorphous work: paintings, drawings, multiples, sculptures, bas-relief and installation.
How to highlight the inflection point in an artist's work, the decisive moment when expression takes a different path? This is the challenge that the Gallery has set itself by choosing to show the work of Daniel Clarke through a variety of recent and older works that bear witness to this turning point.
Taking a path is what it's all about. Daniel Clarke chose at a very young age to leave his native New York after studying drawing and art at Yale University to live in Paris. His Irish ancestors had followed the opposite path. At the crossroads of these cultures, with one foot between each continent, the fundamental questions of identity, memories, physical and artistic positioning feed Daniel Clarke's work.
Very quickly, and then for many years, he defined himself as a figurative painter who endeavoured to reproduce from photographs a reality, a soft and endearing atmosphere of the characters who populate his inner circle. They are standing on a beach, looking towards the horizon, leaning against a window, as if immersed in a form of introspection, reverie or contemplation, present or absent, we don't really know.
"It was a mirror of my life, a mirror of me. Today I have passed to the other side.
This form of introspection present until now in Daniel Clarke's paintings and drawings, he undertakes it for himself in an attempt to unravel his own family history, childhood memories, the weight of the heritage of Irish myths and legends. This reversal of postures causes a rupture, the energy flows, overflows the canvas. A radical change takes place. The artist abandons the narrative form to give way to a raw expression of what emerges from his mind. His compositions, the result of a long process of correction, erasure and reworking, are made up of superimposed snippets of memories, impressions and sensations. They go beyond the frame as if the space of the canvas was too small. From a delicate painting, in oil or pastel, the execution becomes resolutely graphic like a return to his beginnings. It is through drawing, during his studies, that Daniel Clarke approaches artistic expression. Today, graphics are fully asserted both as a tool in the preparatory work and in the execution of his characters or parts of themselves, with sharp and vigorous strokes. The previously languid, static postures are set in motion. The bodies cross the space with determination, tending towards an elsewhere. The colour, until then at the service of a visible reality, in half-tone, participates in the restitution of the idea, of the memory. It exists in its own right, in the same way as the form, frank, vibrant, engaging and contributes to the dynamics of the whole.
This impetus that Daniel Clarke carried in his relationship to painting, drawing, the execution of bas-relief to faithfully retranscribe his home, his intimate space, is now before our eyes on canvas. He knows, as the title of the exhibition says: "Now I Live Here". "Now I live here". Assured by this anchorage, he gives free rein to the expression of his inner space, free and at the same time in a more engaging, even brutal form. His relationship with pictorial art is transformed into a body to body relationship, the same one he has with the material: wood, copper plate. His compositions resist him. He erases, corrects, starts again until this unpremeditated idea appears on the canvas, from his memory, from his unconscious, and from then on it appears as an evidence.
