The first time i encountered works by Alain Clément was in Germany when i visited the Ludwig collection and never stopped loving his works since. Form, colors, shapes it all results for me in a state of happiness.
Alain Clément (74), a former professor and director of the École des Beaux Arts in Nîmes, seeks to unify light and color into an indissoluble entity in his paintings. The horizontal streams of color are often traversed by diagonal streams, and the vertically-running ones often collide with the culmination of the pictorial reality at the surface edges. No sooner do you comprehend one thread of the artistically interwoven color than does it withdraw and you begin to pursue the next.
Alain Clément described his art as follows: “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.”
On occasion the forms are severe, at other times a labyrinthine entanglement of brushstrokes. Or they are of equally nimble and light cut and painted strips—of steel. The figurative may have defined the early work of the artist, but after five decades of seeing, learning and experience, he arrived at abstraction: a superb pas de deux of color and form. And everything that occurs to the radiance on and behind these pictorial spheres emerges from Alain Clément’s unbridled love of life, art, and the inexhaustible wealth of art history; in which, as he once said, Gauguin has influenced—”almost physically energized”—him.
www.ftn-books.com has two beautiful Clement publications available
