Didier Clain, France
Didier Clain (1984) is a French artist who lives and work in Paris and Saint-Denis, Ile de la Réunion. He creates nomadic works that do not belong to any spaces, having never really settled down himself. From drawing to video, he goes as much from digital to graphic as the reverse, thus creating a hybrid, intense and complex whole.
Sketch, canvas, draft, the drawing is part of his narrative process, the appearance of a preliminary layout while it tends to become for Didier Clain an end in itself. Whether it's the support, the subject or the tool, no one can really define at what stage it interferes in his creative process. Nevertheless, it seems that this temporality, essential to the existence of the work, engages a sort of meta-narrativity in which everything can be contained without necessarily identifying its beginning or even its outcome.
The diffuse signs and almost shamanic forms of Didier Clain are the sketches of a self-portrait, of an artist who seeks his place throughout the world, beyond his creole origins, in space and time between island and continent, between present and past, between intimacy and profoundly universal vision.
The transcendent and at the same time intimate aspect of his approach constitutes one of the fundamental paradoxes of his drawing. While conceiving a scaled down design, filled with references specific to his childhood but also to contemporary symbols of pop culture, the artist imagines vaporous devices that go beyond the framework of the event and the space. His features, most often characterized by the color black, take on all their substance and breadth at the heart of a constellation that first floats on paper, and beyond that soaks into the skin.
The link that the artist maintains with the drawing is indeed physically damaged. By applying this medium of demonstration and experimentation, the artist dispossesses himself of the visual, but he also accepts its geographical, aesthetic and temporal upheavals. Beyond the image he has created, a cartography of identities and links is formed. To be linked without seeing each other. Possessing a common genome without knowing it.
His tattoos become real chromosomes that identify a family that cannot be attached to any category. The common time trajectory of these free electrons is no more. Each individual, however volatile, travels new itineraries, forgetting that he was once at the heart of a much larger whole.
Didier Clain's work was exhibited recently at la Cité des Arts de la Réunion, CNEAI and Centre Pompidou.
Sketch, canvas, draft, the drawing is part of his narrative process, the appearance of a preliminary layout while it tends to become for Didier Clain an end in itself. Whether it's the support, the subject or the tool, no one can really define at what stage it interferes in his creative process. Nevertheless, it seems that this temporality, essential to the existence of the work, engages a sort of meta-narrativity in which everything can be contained without necessarily identifying its beginning or even its outcome.
The diffuse signs and almost shamanic forms of Didier Clain are the sketches of a self-portrait, of an artist who seeks his place throughout the world, beyond his creole origins, in space and time between island and continent, between present and past, between intimacy and profoundly universal vision.
The transcendent and at the same time intimate aspect of his approach constitutes one of the fundamental paradoxes of his drawing. While conceiving a scaled down design, filled with references specific to his childhood but also to contemporary symbols of pop culture, the artist imagines vaporous devices that go beyond the framework of the event and the space. His features, most often characterized by the color black, take on all their substance and breadth at the heart of a constellation that first floats on paper, and beyond that soaks into the skin.
The link that the artist maintains with the drawing is indeed physically damaged. By applying this medium of demonstration and experimentation, the artist dispossesses himself of the visual, but he also accepts its geographical, aesthetic and temporal upheavals. Beyond the image he has created, a cartography of identities and links is formed. To be linked without seeing each other. Possessing a common genome without knowing it.
His tattoos become real chromosomes that identify a family that cannot be attached to any category. The common time trajectory of these free electrons is no more. Each individual, however volatile, travels new itineraries, forgetting that he was once at the heart of a much larger whole.
Didier Clain's work was exhibited recently at la Cité des Arts de la Réunion, CNEAI and Centre Pompidou.
In residence at Atelier 11 August 2022
Image: Didier Clain facilitating Drawing Workshop at Atelier 11, May 2022
Image: Didier Clain facilitating Drawing Workshop at Atelier 11, May 2022