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Anaïs Nin once wrote, “I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.” This is the way I first approach art—from the gut and in a very instinctive, immediate way. Then, if the work “stays with me long enough,” this first emotional encounter leads the way to a more “rational” analysis of why I am attracted or repulsed by an artwork. In few cases, the initial sparkle turns into a love-story, and this is certainly one of those cases. |
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Spending Time with the Visitor – Ombretta Agró Andruff
Anaïs Nin once wrote, “I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.”
This is the way I first approach art—from the gut and in a very instinctive, immediate way. Then, if the work “stays with me long enough,” this first emotional encounter leads the way to a more “rational” analysis of why I am attracted or repulsed by an artwork. In few cases, the initial sparkle turns into a love-story, and this is certainly one of those cases.
The first time I saw a painting by Zachary Clement, it was lying against the wall of a hotel corridor, waiting to be installed in the room next door to ours at the Scope Art Fair in Miami in December of 2005, and it truly hit me like a punch in the stomach.
Of course, the striking resemblance to the powerful expressionistic style of Egon Schiele, who happens to be one of my favorite artists of all time, had an impact, but I soon realized that there was much more than that going on. I kept going back to the room to look at the two works, hanging side-by-side and poorly lit in a darkened environment, trying to read the colors, the images. I talked to the artist, whom I had met late the night before the opening of the fair (or was it early in the morning?), while we were both hungover from the wild, Miami-style parties, and my fascination and sense of intrigue grew even stronger.
Clement’s dynamic expressionistic style is made of powerful, excited brush-strokes executed using various media such as acrylic paint, spray paint, oil pastels, graphite and conte crayon on board. The violence of the gestures that quickly trace powerful and suggestive lines with sharp edges at the expense of the figure’s organic structure, gives the paintings a sense of movement and unrest; there is almost no peace or harmony to be felt.
The emaciated and skeletal figures, or “visitors” as the artist calls them, seem to be floating quite autonomously in an abstract space. The highly plastic articulations of separate parts of the body, the eyes often empty or shut, become the reflection and visible expressions of the artist’s inner forces and struggles.
Yet, one of the most intriguing aspects of Clement’s approach to artmaking is that it is genuinely intuitive and, as such, it comes from a very primal or even primitive place. Zachary is a self-taught artist: he grew up in a small town outside Omaha, Nebraska. As he puts it he was “completely isolated from a creative path.” Similarly, he did not go to art school and, at 25 when he started to paint, he knew nothing about Egon Schiele, Edward Munch, Basquiat or Francis Bacon (all of whose work seems to have influenced his), or about art history all together.
His paintings are always self-portraits: he paints with a mirror hanging on his right side, by the window and close to the blank board. He glances at it, attempting to capture his reflection, which is then translated into his signature powerful brush-strokes.
During one of our conversations, he mentioned that, in his first paintings, often the figure would have one eye open and the other closed, a gesture borrowed from the verse of a song that he loved, which became emblematic of his own state of being. On one side (the open eye), he needed to stay focused on painting while overcoming the many obstacles that came his way. On the other side, the closed eye would allow him to be true to himself—to the inner child he felt that he had finally re-connected with through painting, without being influenced by outside judgment or social and cultural restraints.
When I asked him about the word “Visitor,” which gives the title to the series exposed at Hangar 7, he replied that it’s a term that simply kept coming up for him. He explains; “I feel like an outsider, like a visitor, like someone who is here, but not for long, like a restless soul in search of something, like child in a new place always seeing and discovering something new.” And then he added; “If I try too hard to explain, it just comes out contrived and boring…I paint because it feels good and I think that when people rely on instinct and don’t over-analyze they will connect with what I do.”
So, let’s leave it at that.
