E31 Gallery is pleased to present the first showing of Clement Page’s watercolour drawings in Athens.
Like spectral grisaille the watercolours of the artist-film-maker Clement Page show something as to the hidden visible(s) of our
lived psychological existence. They expose to view allusions to the many manias and phobias that haunt the human condition.
Drawing frequently on the Freudian and psycho-analytic tradition of thought and therapeutics, Page's works often reveal
(rather than illustrate) the inner workings and meanings of our day-to-day psycho-pathological activity. Something that Sigmund
Freud called simply 'the psychopathology or everyday life'.
The current series of drawings make reference to Freud's famous narrative of 'The Wolfman,' perhaps, one of the best known analyses and accounts of infantile neurosis presented by the Viennese psycho-analyst. While dealing with a series of animal 'phobias' and their exorcism, the images present and reveal the complex askance of hidden inference implicit to the great master
of modern psychotherapy. And, the fact that Page creates the images in black and white, grisaille(s) that double as if they were photographic negatives (exposures), only furthers their density of psychological allusion.
With all these images it is important not to read them merely as illustrations or transcriptions, rather they deliberately extend the evocations and possibilities of the Freudian narrative. Clement Page's films have dealt with similar complex issues of phobias and other various forms of self-limitation. But as the drawing ‘Desire caught in its own net’ 2008, suggests, the greater emphasis needs in this instance to be placed purely on their status as drawings, and on the concentrated inverse-obverse sense of their largely black and white pictorial-mental horizons. The subject matter is represented simply as a delicate suffusion of paper support and watercolour, which in turn gives an optical delicacy to the drawings undermining notions of illustration.
This said the spectral sense of a work like ‘The Seduction’ 2008, leaves no doubt that the man (father?) and girl child are entering
an ambiguous erotic space, and the photographic negative-like effect of the image only makes the content all the more affective.
However, it is important also to see these drawings as the beginning of a long research process for the artist, whereby he will extend his investigations into 'The Wolfman' both in film, painting, and further drawings. Hence in this instance we are a privileged party to its early stage of introduction.
© MARK GISBOURNE 2008
Mark Gisbourne is an English critic /curator of contemporary art based in Berlin. He has
published many books, including ‘Berlin Art Now’ 2006, and more recently ‘Double Acts’ 2007
For more information please email: e31art@otenet.gr