HUMAN NATURE
GROUP SHOW at the Journal Gallery, Los Angeles
June 7th - August 10th 2024
MAMOTH GALLERY, LONDON
March 22nd - May 4th 2024
Oliver Clegg is the ultimate jester. His aptitude for painterly play and invocations of the medium’s history entwine on the makeshift canvases he assembles from scrap wood. They inscribe the work with not only the artist’s immediate context, but his interest in the rehabilitative methods of Dadaism. Clegg’s style can be directly linked to mid century Spanish painters such as Diego Velázquez and Jusepe de Ribera, the latter figure notable for his Caravaggistic impulse. The implementation of chiaroscuro is also a nod to the efforts of Baroquian players like Rembrandt, whose calculated tenebrism is a consistent point of reference for Clegg. By excavating the medium’s past, he proves himself to be a resourceful composer of images.
In these new works, Clegg returns to the Dada approach he implemented during his studies at City & Guilds in London. The use of a school desk, with names carved and drawings scribbled, is inscribed with the ghosts of users past. Having gone through a personal loss at the time, Clegg turned to churches, schools and institutions beyond the limitations of the individual. As such, relatively academic painting is consigned to the recuperative format. A sense of grandiosity is contrasted with throwaway surfaces, as Clegg’s formal mastery meets the standards set by objet trouvé artists. This decision is centered around the framework of “discard” in both the physical and psychological realms. Plumbing personal and conceptual histories is staged alongside the absorption of found materials. For this exhibition, aggregated wood planks were pulled from the construction site of the artist’s Costa Rican home.
The center of these combines are relatively secure, their outer contours less organized. There are slight decisions in terms of assemblage, keeping within some form of structure, a basic format that lends to both landscape and portraiture. The majority, however, is left to chance. Clegg’s painting thus commences without an overwrought concern for surface, toggling the uneven levels in order to create his selection of images. When appraised from different positions under gallery lighting, the viewer meets nodes that counter the flatness of a standard canvas. Practicality and opticality are at the fore of his artistic stance, as he curates the lighting and pictorial situations of his stance.
In his willingness to glide between different compositional frameworks, Clegg finds a singular position within the field of painting. He explores the tensions between tradition and Dadaism. Described by Robert Storr as “picture-plane-puncturing techniques,” the umbrella of chiaroscuro is a model that Clegg often returns to. Driven by his own colorblindness, he seeks alternative modes for composing, ultimately seeing form before colors and engaging with an overwhelmingly earthy palette. Surrealism, too, is expressed through the observation of harmonies and imaginative situations. Clegg sets aspects of daily life slightly askew, like a bottled seascape and armed chicken.
It should be unsurprising that images are of constant concern for the artist. Previous bodies of work revolved around multifarious cat paintings, Happy Meal toys sourced from ebay listings, and cartoon characters in balloon form. In the case of Sometimes, Forever, the emotional panopoly contained within the painter manifests itself in Clegg’s specific image selection process. Rather than stage the exhibition around a particular concept, he delves into subjectivity. Clegg maintains an enthusiastic attitude toward his lot in life. Outlook is everything;
As soon as one admits there are more golden eggs on the horizon, good fortune can transpire. Though this proverbial egg is laid by geese, Clegg intends to credit a chicken with his personal kismet. There’s also doubt expressed in the painting Soup of the day. The owl motif connotes wisdom - false or otherwise - while a pub beer alludes to the building up of courage. The patently artificial strength engendered by intoxication dampens the bird’s sapient implication.
The seduction of these paintings is yet another critical facet for Clegg. Through the renderings of risible subjects alongside glass and metal, he weaves humor and desire together, arriving at temperamentally evasive image worlds. In I’m afraid that idiots cant be hypnotised a ceramic heart glistens within the cropped pair of anonymous hands, culminating in attraction and sentimentalism alike. Alternatively, Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you. sees its sympathetic protagonist clutches a double-bloomed stem. This monkey appears dejected, but unable to shake his longing for love.
Despite their contrasts, a marked consistency inscribed within Clegg’s selection of paintings for Sometimes, Forever. A particular rhythm characterizes the show, one that is set by the artist’s eccentricities and adroitness.
TEXT by REILLY DAVIDSON
The Journal Gallery, NYC
October 20th - November 3rd 2023
Strange comes in degrees
It’s not a coincidence that we think of summer and winter as solid-state nouns, while spring and fall are verbs that are as active as you can get. That’s not just because we see spring and fall as times of transition: the actual duration of daylight changes more rapidly around the equinoxes and more slowly at the solstices, so spring springs and fall falls much faster.
Of course, spring springs up with summer light—fall falls down into the nightly, whitely crib death of winter, filling late October with a sense of dread. Is it any accident that we have a holiday for whistling in the darkling gloom?
Oliver Clegg does not paint for Halloween alone. But his latest show of work, which opens October 20th and will be on view over the holiday, skews surreally towards the season’s dark imagination, with a handful and eyeful of imagery designed to both soothe and disturb — a magnified eyeball, a disembodied, seven-fingered hand, a dying ghost and, maybe least unsettling of all, a flowing, flying ghost right out of a vintage boys’ book of horror stories.
Clegg was born and schooled in art history in the U.K. and in painting in Italy; after stints living and working in Cornwall and New York, he’s now a resident of Costa Rica. Clegg is a throwback to the time when an art history education didn’t begin with radical discourses on postwar ontologies. As he recalls it, his own study of art history started centuries earlier, went up to surrealism and stopped, leaving students to study the 20th century in other courses.
But it was meant to be: Clegg’s nascent feeling for a conceptual approach had already become beguiled by modernist talents like the objet trouvé radicalism of Marcel Duchamp and the flawless, eerie pictorialism of Salvador Dalí, the stark dreaminess of Giorgio de Chirico. And as his painting practice grew, it began to develop its own stance, standing on an unusual tripod of legs—the chiaroscuro modernism of Édouard Manet, the clever surrealism of René Magritte and the sentimental realism of Norman Rockwell.
Carefully seeking out elements like childhood toys and nostalgic icons and recontextualizing them in a sly but sinister way, Clegg has developed his own brand of magical realism. He has done this literally, using found panels of wood to paint on rather than canvas and combing flea markets for interesting tokens and trinkets to picture in his works. He has a special genius for finding things that blur the line between being special to him and being special to everyone—following George Bernard Shaw’s famous dictum, “The more personal, the more universal.”
His latest works delve even more into the person-iversal. Painted in oil on spare, squarish but irregular pieces of formaleta, leftover wood from construction of his house in Cotsa Rica, the group of seven new paintings balances desolation and hope on a knife point—epitomized in the image of a flower blooming out of a rock in a valley of stone. But as tempting as it is to read some message about whistling in the dark in such imagery, Clegg’s aim is more to reach back through adulthood and adolescence to the truest fount of plastic inspiration—childhood—when wonderful and weird and terrible things can occur and mingle without any final interpretation being laid down in stone.
As in the great novels of “lo real maravilloso” by Gabriel García Marquèz or Isabel Allende, art is neither a happy escape nor a damnation of humanity. In their own way, Clegg’s old-school oils are rather contemporary—reminders to look without judging; to imagine without concluding; to feel without knowing.
Not that knowing is a bad thing, per se. It’s just nice to have options.
– David Colman
Mamoth Gallery, London
April 8th - May 15th 2022
Exhibition walk-around:
THE JOURNAL GALLERY, NYC. 2019
GALERIE NOLAN JUDIN, BERLIN. 2011
Galerie Nolan Judin, Berlin. 2011
British artist Oliver Clegg (b 1980) has gained a reputation as a multi-faceted artist whose meticu- lously executed works hover between two and three-dimensional disciplines. A masterful draughts- man and skilled painter, Clegg is paradoxically one of the most conceptually minded young artists working today, engaging with language, narrative and memory and drawing from symbolism and surre- alism in his practice.
Playing as he likes to with words in different languages, Clegg found himself returning time and again to: ’berceuse’, the French for lullaby. The word became the genesis for a new body of work and the title for the artist’s first solo show in Berlin. Clegg was struck by the onomatopoeic quality of ‘berceuse’; the way it mimics the soothing sound of a parent coaxing their child into dreamland. Dreams are significant to the artist as a means for creating a space that seems half way between the real and the surreal. And indeed the surrealist notion of ’the harmony of disharmonious elements’ is keenly important to him and evident in this exhibition. By including objects that have strong symbolic mean- ings but that appear to be behaving in ways only comprehensible in this dream world, the artist can introduce a playful element into his work.
Play is a motif that has run throughout Clegg’s practice to date, as exemplified by his paintings of discarded toys, executed on found drawing boards. The objects speak of private nostalgias but evoke commonly held experiences of the moment when the child ’gives up’ a treasured blanket or toy. Though it is the object that disappears, often far more is lost. In his essay, ’Creative Writers and the Daydream’, Freud states that though the fantasy world of childhood is lost to grown ups, it can be kept alive by writers and artists in their work. This is of key importance to Clegg.
Clegg is sensitive to the significance of ordinary objects, transformed in the hands of a writer or an artist. This act of recycling began when Clegg was still at art school. He collected old drawing boards, prizing them for their scratchings and doodles. Clegg likes the fact these come with their own unique histories that relate to somebody else’s life. Emotive objects such as a diary or well-thumbed book, a school desk, blanket box, chess-set or even floorboards from a de-consecrated church, acquire a noble quality in Clegg’s hands. By working with these artefacts, Clegg allows the viewer to wander between narratives and worlds, uniting extant references with new images, or creating entirely new ones, recalling Duchamp: ’it is the onlookers who make the pictures’.
For this exhibition Clegg has produced seven new paintings and a sculpture. The show com- mences with ’Begin’ a wooden cradle with its title carved into its bottom. The cradle is symbolic of the start of life’s journey and, thus its association with death as well as with life, is unavoidable. An empty cradle is also suggestive of the child having grown up. Once it was lulled by its mother to sleep, but now as it moves through childhood, it must settle itself, the night no longer offering a welcome escape from the day, instead bringing an onslaught of dreams.
‘Think of Me’ depicts a double self-portrait of the seated artist viewed from behind. He appears to be looking in a mirror, yet sees not his reflection but the view the observer is confronted with: the back of his head, thus calling into question the artist’s sense of identity. The work is clearly a homage to Magritte but by Clegg painting the image on an assemblage of found mirrors it is as if he is being judged against the others who have looked in these mirrors before him; the work is pregnant with the artist’s sense of emotional conflict, and with the dreams and everyday concerns of all those who have peered into the mirrors.
The German word ‘Zugzwang’ is an international chess term meaning ’you have to make a move’. With his use of chiaroscuro and the posing of the figure in a manner typical of the Italian Baroque, Clegg’s self portrait is both intriguing and sensuous. Painted on the back of fourteen found chess boards, an already loaded surface, the work derives from the premise of conflict: in this case between tragedy and comedy, as attested by the presence of the two masks. Each board has seen many games so it is possible to think about this work as the sum of the energy of multiple minds while simultane- ously reflecting the warring emotions of the artist.
The title ‘In Words Drown I’ is a palindrome, it spells the same backwards as well as forwards. The painting features a girl reaching out to her sleeping self. The depicted scene recalls an example of
Galerie Judin
reflexive vision given by the phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He challenged Descartes’ claim that because the world is external to the artist, in order to know it, the artist attempts to recreate it. This argument of Descartes gave art history a representationalist understanding of vision and art. Merleau-Ponty challenged this view by claiming that because the artist moves through the world at the same time as looking at it, the world cannot be external to him: he sees both the world - and himself in that world. Merleau-Ponty illustrates his argument through the use of the following paradoxical anal- ogy: if I touch myself, I am both touching and being touched; but both actions are experienced by me. In the case of Clegg’s painting, the subject is reaching out to her sleeping self, the conscious mind sink- ing, or ‘drowning’ in the sub-conscious.
Clegg enjoys word games and ‘Piano Forte’, painted on a dismantled piano, is one such example. Though the title describes the physical essence of the piano, the words also mean ‘soft’ and ‘strong’; per- haps another reference to the dichotomy of the self who finds himself divided between what he thinks and feels and what he can actually express.
The paintings ‘I’ and ‘II’, feature isolated, domestic objects: a floating pillow and a floating chair, painted on floorboards recovered from a demolished church. The fact the chair in ‘II’ is floating suggests it has transcended its normal function and gained a sentimental, even spiritual dimension. Maybe this chair was once associated with a particular owner and is thus imbued with sentimental sig- nificance. That objects can be powerfully emotive signifiers is no surprise but the added component of the objects floating is perturbing, suggestive even of the ascension of the spirit. Again Clegg presents the viewer with a conundrum: the chair is an object associated with grounding the human in earthly space. The pillow in ’I’ on the other hand has an aerial quality. Clegg has identified two of the most essential objects associated with helping the human through day and night. That the chair is another symbol of the conscious mind, and the pillow of the subconscious, is perhaps deliberately unclear, the viewer being again reminded of Duchamp’s phrase concerning his role in the process of looking at art.
‘Plato is a Bore’ concludes the exhibition. The work consists of a dangling puppet painted on a dis- mantled Edwardian school desk. The puppet reminds Clegg of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave which describes a group of people who have been chained to the walls of a cave all their lives. Shadows are cast on the walls by people outside the cave walking by, and over time the cave’s inhabitants ascribe forms to these shadows. It is not until one of the people is freed from the cave that he realises the shad- ows do not constitute reality at all, merely a puppet theatre version of it. Plato’s analogy was intended to explain the importance of knowledge governing sensation. Clegg’s hanging puppet serves to remind the viewer that experience needs to be accompanied by knowledge. The title of this piece could well have been scrawled on the desk itself by a bored schoolboy who has not yet emerged from ‘the cave’.
Oliver Clegg lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Jane Neal
