calendario eventi  :: 

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25/3/2011

Clement Page

Kuckei + Kuckei, Berlin

“Hold Your Breath” is based on Sigmund Freud´s observations on case study “The Wolf-Man: From the History of an Infantile Neurosis”. The black-and-white film tells the story of five year old Sergei Pankejeff and his continuously growing phobia of animals, wolves in particular. In his latest filmic project Clement Page figures out the reasons for the phobia and the corresponding family relations surrounding the boy. The transformation of the puerile character, which goes along with fear and confusion, contain scraps of reality and fantasy. Thereby Page refers to several theories Freud sets up for the case and blends them together.

Accompanying “Hold Your Breath” are several watercolours with topical similarities to the film. Filmic moments freeze like an filmstill and were enhanced through Clement Page´s generic negative/positiv impact in terms of reality conceptions. For the first time the current exhibition will present coloured as oppose to black-and-white watercolours.
The film is sponsored in 2010 by the medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg GmbH in the category „Artistic Low Budget Film“ and the Sigmund Freud-Stiftung in Frankfurt/Main.

CLEMENT PAGE
Screen Memories
Picturing Lost Time in the
Watercolours of Clement Page

This series of intense monochrome watercolours, although initially inspired by Freud’s classic case study of the Wolfman,(1) have now taken on a life of their own, exploring the space of memory and desire, dreams and experience. The watercolours appear to be in the form of photographic negatives, an increasingly archaic form of producing a positive image. This functions as a coherent trope for the unconscious – the negative is the ‘unconscious’ equivalent of the ‘positive’ conscious mind. Page employs la vraie aquarelle, or ‘true watercolour technique’, not using any white or opaque pigments but only the white of the paper combined with transparent glazes. This gives the paintings a shifting, effervescent quality, as if they existed between two perceptual realms, that of the ‘real’ and that of memory and dreams.

What is not shown is as important as what is seen, the ‘gaps’ in perception, the white paper, that which is before the painting, ends up being a large percentage of the final work. And as the negative functions as the unconscious so on another level the white within the painting is also a trope for the unconscious, literally the ‘ground of being’ destroying the black, eating away at the form, as fantasy leaches into reality and suppressed desire is manifest in the real world in unconscious behaviour and sublimated action. Since this is a negative the white is in fact a representation of shadow, the dark hidden unconscious; every conscious thought has a negative, or unconscious shadow.

Page uses the negative to create a ‘dream space’, a world in which things are, although recognisable as tangible objects, in a state of constant flux, dissolution and reconfiguration, in which objects blur into one another, boundaries dissolve and substantial areas of the work erupt into a pre-figurative mythopoeia. This correlates to the process by which conscious certainty is eroded by dream ideas and unconscious activity. The unconscious being the ontology or origin of a person’s ‘reality’ of what is considered their ‘real life’.

The paintings are constructed from several different images, like dreams, a montage of different perspectives and sources, questioning the language of photographic seeing, the relationship between figuration and abstraction and between the flatness of the paper and the depiction of depth. The images are first highly manipulated, the artist digitally ‘painting’ into the negatives before they are printed out and combined with images which are positive, thus disrupting a coherent and conventional reading of space. There is in fact a complete deconstruction of conventional spatial depth – such as ariel perspective and normal depth of field, and these strategies perfectly echo the mechanisms of the unconscious as it constructs alternate and constantly shifting virtual realities in the dream world.

Watercolour is a medium ideally suited to this process; it is all about leaving the white – like film, leaving the light. One could posit the realm within which Page is operating as that of ‘the optical unconscious’ of Rosalind Krauss.(2) There is a life in art outside of the modernist aesthetic, outside of formalism, abstraction, postmodernism, deconstruction and minimalism. This is the realm from which Page’s mesmeric watercolours arise; it is a realm enriched by the potent, uncanny, disturbing and terrifying – yet often beautiful – content of the human unconscious.

A key image from the recent history of art for Page is Richard Hamilton’s limited edition screen-print from 1967, I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas. The image was derived from a colour negative of a still from the film Holiday Inn staring Bing Crosby. Here was a singular early exploration of the power of inverting the tonal structure of the image, thus uncovering the ‘strangeness’ which lies just below the surface of our everyday reality. However, for Page it is not so much the unusual colour combinations thrown up by colour reversal which is fascinating as the way that this inversion projects the viewer into an alternative universe. We live in a world permeated by photographic images, to the extent that they have become the main mediator of reality, even the reality of art, most of which is received through photographic reproduction, and so the photographic has become the structuring motif of our dreamscapes and fantasies.

The Hamilton image resonates with Page’s watercolour Night for Day (2007) where a lone figure is seen wandering a deserted street, lights now register as dark ‘spores’ lugubriously ‘illuminating’ the streets with an uncanny ‘black light’. The shadows become the light and the light becomes the shadows; it is as if even the reassuring light of day has turned into a dark ray capable of revealing the hidden secrets of the dreamer. In some of the watercolours, such as The Seduction (2008) and Desire Caught in its Own Net (2008) large parts of the painting dissolve into an amorphous cloudy plasma of dedifferentiated formlessness, a syntexis of pre- and post-imagistic light and shadow. It is into this matrix that the viewer projects their own latent phantoms, a pareidolia of unconscious content. This radical disruption of the depth of field opens up a Rorschachian arena for the imagination mimicking the Freudian methodology of free association.

At heart the series of watercolours is indexed by the notion of cryptophobia, a fear of secrets. Although Freudian analysis attempts to uncover the hidden content that is causing mental imbalance in the subject, the analysand and analyst are constantly battling against a fear of revelation. The paintings at once reveal and simultaneously conceal their latent content, like a pictorial equivalent of the analytical process.

(1) Sigmund Freud, ‘From a History of an Infantile Neurosis’, 1918, reprinted in Peter Gay, The Freud Reader, Vintage, London, 1995
(2) Rosalind E Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, The MIT Press, 1993

Richard Dyer © 2009

Richard Dyer is News Editor and London Correspondent for Contemporary magazine, Art Editor of Wasafiri and Assistant Editor of Third Text. His critical writing has appeared in Frieze, Flash Art, Art Review, Art Press, Third Text, The Independent, The Guardian, Time Out and many other publications. His latest book is Making the (In)visible in the work of Mark Francis (Lund Humphries and Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, 2008). He is also a published poet and fiction writer, his first poetry collection, A Western Journey, was published by Arlen House (2006).

Opening reception March 26th, h 7 - 9 pm

Kuckei + Kuckei
Linienstr. 158 D - 10115 Berlin
Opening hours: Tuesday - Friday 11-18 h
Saturday 11 - 17 h

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