Alain Clément — Papiers — Catherine Putman Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 20 → July 30, 2017

This exhibition, which is the fruit of a collaboration between the artist and the gallery that goes back more than twenty years, includes around thirty works, comprising unique pieces and prints—a selection of the artist’s paper works executed over the last fifteen years.

Like all the gallery’s artists, Alain Clément, a painter, sculptor, and engraver, has a marked predilection for works produced on paper. His creative process simultaneously incorporates work on large paintings, gouaches, and small-scale sculptures: ‘This simultaneity is necessary to create an interaction between the various mediums and fuse them into a common project.’¹ The small suspended mural reliefs in painted steel, dating from 2004–2005, highlight this interaction.

Alain Clément’s papers are often at the juncture between painting and drawing. Categorised as an abstract artist, Alain has a primarily physical and sensual relation with painting, in which colour plays an essential role. The use of charcoal, which is more or less visible, highlights the drawing, whether architectural or composed of curves and interlacing lines. The exhibition begins chronologically with gouaches from his ‘Tuscan’ period, executed in 2003 after returning from a visit to Italy in the spring of 2002. Alain Clément’s paintings on canvas and paper have a sculptural quality, which was already present in his work and has become more complex. The colours have been transformed and imbued with Italian tones and light.

The exhibition then continues with a presentation of gouaches executed in 2004, whose surfaces, which are entirely covered with gouache, contain geometric compositions in which darker colours are arranged in a subtle balance with white rectangles. Then the style becomes more sensual, the forms become rounded, and the arabesques are depicted in charcoal or gouache, and eventually become dancing silhouettes in a series of small-format monochrome and bicoloured works, executed in 2015.

The second part of the exhibition highlights Alain Clément’s unique and close relation with the gallery through his prints. The collaboration began in 1989 in a joint edition with Marie-Hélène Montenay, when Catherine Putman was primarily a publisher; several series of prints have been produced over twenty years and are an integral part of the gallery’s history.

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Alain Clément was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1941. He lives and works in Nîmes, Paris, and Berlin. As of 1970, he taught at the École des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier, which he then left to work in the École des Beaux-Arts in Nîmes, of which he became director in 1985.

For almost forty years, the artist has developed an abstract oeuvre that lies between expression and a quest for composition. His paintings, sculptures, and prints combine aesthetic pleasure, subtlety, and compositional power. The Musée d’Art Moderne in Céret is holding a solo exhibition of his works (11 February–14 May 2017), following on from the exhibition in the Arsenal-Musée in Soissons (30 April–30 August 2016).

¹ Extract of Alain Clément’s interview with Nathalie Gallissot, Alain Clément exhibition catalogue, 11 February–14 May 2017, the Musée d’Art Moderne in Céret.