Tag Archives: Post-digital Painterly Abstraction

Relic I

Relic I by Andre Clements

Relic I

A highlight of the ‘Temple Stadia’ series. The holy grail. The objectification of our true religion, of competition, the unreacable promise of completion and closure. The idol of sentimental aspiration. From 100 photographs of trophies. That something we yearn for, pursue at all cost, even though it is impossible to fin where it begins or where it ends or even if its ‘real’.

Mall Composure

Mall Composure by Andre Clements

Mall Composure

From 26 images taken with a Nokia e71 walking through Sandton City on my way to the Joburg Art Fair. I’ve often wondered at the sometimes negligible difference between mannequins and some personae. Can’t help but notice their nose is disappearing due to some of the figures being headless with their sleek plato’d necks reflecting the ubiquitous display lighting. So many reflections. Been meaning to do this for some time.

Lilith

Lilith by Andre Clements

Lilith

Drawing a shroud on a distant yet lucid recollection
a visitation, in its place
drawing a shroud that is impossible to draw
on a memory of falling
upwards through a veil,
teased
touched
tormented yet consoled and even requited
in the maddening and in the silence,

as per Edgar Alan Poe’s ‘A Dream Within A Dream’:

‘Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow–
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand–
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep–while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?’

Cheribium

Cheribium by Andre Clements

Cheribium

I sifted through literally hundreds of search engine results for photographs of team mascots.

While those cutsey babies with wings are popularly but ‘incorrectly’ called cherubs, the real things are strange allegedly rather fierce mythical beings that bridge the physical and meta-physical realms.  Perhaps a kind of antecedent for the holey ghost. Certainly heavily influenced by Egyptian mythology through Moses’ upbringing in the Egyptian court (Geers 2010), Judeo Christian scripture implies they are something of a vehicle for God’s presence. A merger perhaps of animism and antropomorphism.

Body Language (of Emmanuel Radnitzky)

Body Language (of Emmanuel Radnitzky) by Andre Clements

Body Language (of Emmanuel Radnitzky)

58 of Emmanuel Radnitzky AKA Man Ray’s photographs of female nudes. While not intentional, the visual resonance with Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2′ is hardly surprising, in fact I’ve been meaning work around that for a while. Something along the lines of ‘Ascending Stairs’ and exploring simultaneous temporal and figurative fragmentation but want someting more inter-subjective.

Pieza Principal

Pieza Principal (from Las Meninas) by Andre Clements

Pieza Principal (from Las Meninas)

Reinterpreting Diego Velázquez’s ‘Las Maninas’ (‘The Maids of Honour’) by breaking the original composition into seven visual concepts. Then sourced, combined and averaged at least ten images per concept and in turn combined and averaged those. It relates to ‘Charisma’ which applies a different, perhaps more post-modernist, kind of abstraction process to the same original reference.  Here it is more about what emerges from the space of relationships while in ‘Charisma’ the focus is on the compliment of the typical Antropomorphism biased perception of implicit narrative relations.

The Temple

The Temple

The Temple

Dedicated to what is arguably the greatest religion of our time, competition. Satelite photographs of the world’s fifteen largest stadia, super-imposed, aligned and merged into a single image. The first piece from the ‘Testament Stadia’ series.

Suggested Reading:

  • The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris (2005)