André S Clements

First a little theoretical contextualisation: I favour the more abstract, but try to move up and down the conceptual escalators of inductive and deductive process. From one point of departure, visual art could be seen as the production of records. These ‘records’ can be seen as sets of information, regardless of whether the ‘information’ in question is the coordinates and RGB values of certain pixels, or a sublime discourse between oil, pigment, canvas, and the whims and ticks of an artist. I am drawn to engage with processes which explicitly employ additive or subtractive procedural methodologies. If abstraction is seen as a vertical dimension, the socio-technical continuum becomes the horizontal dimension. While I am a technophile I’m painfully aware that technicality for its own sake is not particularly interesting or meaningful.    

For me, the real magic hides somewhere in the interaction and integration of apparently disparate realms.  

Temple/Stadia

My own favourite series of images at the moment is a series called ‘Temple/Stadia‘    

Relic (Detail)

I like to classify this series as part of my ‘post-digital painterly abstraction‘ experiment.  Briefly, the notion entails overloading the image space with recorded reality, and compressing these records back into a single image, a palimpsest, with conceptual and visual alignment ultimately responsible for setting a visual trajectory that embraces chaos and ambiguity while ultimately producing a kind of distillation. A kind of sfumato occurs, which perhaps facilitates the release of something almost spiritual from the ordinary input.    

The Temple

The first piece in the series is called ‘The Temple’. It is the true average of satellite photographs of the 15 largest sports stadia in the world. It is a relatively small piece with an images size of about 17 x 27cm    

Congregation

‘Congregation’ is the average of many photographs of people seated on the stands inside stadia. 37 x 50 cm image size.    

Deaconry

For ‘Deaconry’ I used photographs of national teams, typically posing for group photographs in their team uniforms. 33 x 50 cm image.    

Cherubium

‘Cherubium’ uses photographs of team mascots, . 30 x 23 cm image.   

Relic I

‘Relic I’ combines photographs of trophies of major sporting tournaments. 50 x 34 cm image.    

Other Post-digital Painterly Abstractions

My most recent excursion applying Google image search on Photoshop, as opposed to Windsor & Newton on Canvas, and the most successful so far in my mind in terms of achieving a kind of clinical painterly abstraction, is ‘Yes we have a soul but it is made of lots of tiny robots’.    

Yes, we have a soul, but it is made of lots of tiny robots

Its image size is 40 x 45cm. It is the average of 84 images, equally divided into 7 themes including: circuit boards, flocks of birds, space telescope images, insects, technical diagrams, clouds and, of course, conventional robots. It is inspired by the philosophical discourse around determinism by the likes of Daniel Dennet

Untitled Kentridge

In ‘Untitled Kentridge’, 38 x 48cm image, I ‘compressed’ 192 of Mr William Kentridges’s etchings.

Landscape Abstraction

Rockey Street

Alexandra

‘Rockey street’, 41 x 60 cm, and the ‘Alexandra’ also 41cm high, date from 2006. I’ve recently started working on photographic landscape abstractions again. (Watch this space.)

5th Avenue NY

 5th Avenue NY, 7 x 12 cm, used Google StreetView as source.

Revisionary Interventionist Pictografts (RIP)

At the other end of the spectrum, a memento series I’m busy with reworks famous paintings, where I employ laborius manual image editing (as is used to remove blemishes from the skin of fashion models), to remove the foreground figures.    

Charisma

Charisma, 34 x 30cm image, based on ‘Las Meninas’, relegates the original foreground to the mirror and framed painting on the background wall.    

a Pearl Earring

‘a Pearl Earring’, leaves just a suggestion of the girl.    

For me, these pieces explore a space that relates mortality with cognition and consciousness. I’ve been working on the latest installment in this series for a while, where I’m ‘cleaning up’ the ‘Last Supper’.    

Last Supper Under Construction

While I have printed one edition of Charisma on archival paper, I intend producing these pieces mostly as Giclée prints on canvas with manually applied varnish.    

Artoon Pastiches (AP)

Then of course there is perhaps the most accessible of my work, which I don’t mind calling ‘artoons‘.  ( These have recently been featured in the ’South African Art Times’.)

Julius Malema as Jean-Paul Marat

Malema as Marat is a 50 x 30 print, not for those who demand surgically precise high-resolution detail, part of its charm is in the contrast of newspaper photograph resolution and roughness with neo-classical aesthetics, resonating I hope, with the contrast of European styled political aspirations of  exponents of contemporary South African politics with the socio cultural  realities we face.    

For the Love of the Game

‘For the Love of the Game’ rides on Mr Hirsh’s scull, it is a relatively large piece at 99.9 x 66.6 cm, of individually shaded ‘Jabulani’ soccerbals with the controversial logo carefully obfuscated.    
 
My recent prints are giclée prints printed by Ricardo Fornoni of Resolution Gallery (I previously had mostly Lambda photographic prints produced). I limit the editions to 5 per piece in almost all cases.

These and a selection of other pieces can be viewed (and enlarged) at my online portfolio.