Claude
Deutschland
Kunstart: Malerei
Technik: Acryl
Stil: Gegenständlich
Statement:
"[…] his paintings celebrate the way human beings become engulfed by their erotic imaginations and simple acts of identification multiply and transform. Claude is an artist who incisively explores the complex interconnections between our most innate desires and their transcendent constructions.
Claude always paints from life, drawn towards domestic plants, vegetables and more recently, male models. Claude immerses himself in an intense analysis and personal engagement with the subject that pushes his vision beyond the real.
Claude approaches his various subjects with a similar intent, spending countless nocturnal hours of careful observation and study that results in images that although appear voyeuristic are portrayed with deadpan humour and refreshing spontaneity.
With this heightened sense of realism or autistic vision of all his subjects, Claude animates everything he observes oscillating between desire and detachment."
(M. Doigt de Poisson, curator)
Since his early installations, paintings and objects, Claude has worked much with the ambivalence between the carnevalesque and the feeling of resignation or failure.
His art is primarily expressionistic, a cryptogram for memories and emotions that can be ubiquitous and secretive, intimate and universal.
Appropriating methods traditionally identified with feminine pursuits, Claude’s most recent work features series of ‘mental portraits’, with codes, signs and symbols that unintentionally explore ideas of memory, desire and interpretation.
The portraits assume a savagely impulsive, yet tender, raw quality, executed in what he alludes to be ‘human blood letters’. Taking the form of random thought patterns, these strings of physical words slip into phrases that avoid narrative structure from one to the other.
Using his own experience – and frequently his own body – as source material for the work, he explores ideas of self-portraiture and narrative disclosure, both intimately bound up with his own biography.
As a whole, Claude sees the structure of the work as an ‘embodiment of silent desires’.
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