CÔME CLÉRINO

Extract from « Côme Clérino : Identity ? Painter ! »

Gaya GOLDCYMER

January 2017

The city as the object of desire.

I let my eyes wander, I visualise the work of Côme, moving from one work to the next, from one moment to the next, to dwell on the abundance of images and of their meaning. Here, in his approach, in his production, what comes to mind are subversive images: Subversion with multiple tonalities; soft and light, direct or violent. But it is also an approach of construction and of diversion, of formulation and of reformulation, of cutting and of recutting, of recovery and of diversion, of appropriation and of the creation of images.

We are walking,

so much to say that we are tracing - and it surprises me then to think of the importance of the spot and I feel afresh the poetic dimension of the link that binds art to the urban world. I feel the sometimes intensely pictorial dimension of plastic works around the urban world and especially the city as the object of desire: The object of desire for the artist as much as for the viewer ...

On edge,

Our senses are sharpened by this network, by the play of full-scale urban tracks, I perceive associations of images gushing in cascades according to places, images, emotions, observations and thoughts. As usual, I let my mind wander and I think of Calder, who inscribed his stabiles in the cities of Chicago or Spolète, Boccioni, Fernand Léger or Antonio Sant’Elia, and so many others, the many precursors, all lovers of urban civilisation.

I think of this strange alchemy. The alchemy in which the passer-by; the viewer - as well as the artist; the creator - both seek to create the point of balance between everything ... and to everything: In Architecture and in the calligram, in restoring the elements in the canvas, in drawing, in painting. Thus I dream of this precious and unfailing complicity uniting the two partners of an inseparable binomial: Thus the artist and the viewer re-enchant the city and the world.

In this multiplicity of materials,

I grasp the point of balance which Côme plays with and also plays on himself: Through collage, assemblages, the plaster blocks he uses to mount his walls and to build them, the serigraphy he affixes and then overlays and then paints on top of. I realise the pleasure he gains from using tar and bitumen to divert fragments recovered from the street; the rubble and bits of construction which he then alters, always counterpointing: To capture and freeze elusive atmospheres he photographs his work, archiving the impalpability of a modified temporality. His paintings become installations in situ; true chronicles of the ephemeral, like an announcement of the disappearance of things. First he documents, then destroys.

Then I wonder

how does this artist maintain his relationship with painting, how does he claim the pictorial while at the same time claiming his link to the map and to the territory. I wonder how here and now, after all the inaugural fractures of the avant-gardes and in our present post post-modernity, he can put forth and maintain, over and over again with such force and intensity, an identity: his identity as a painter..