Bruce Clarke challenges our certainties and prejudices, awakens our empathy and revitalizes images and words to raise our awareness of the tragedies that punctuate contemporary history. This questioning, through the prism of art, can be discovered until November 18 in the exhibition “Créer au Bord du Volcan (Creating at the Volcano’s Edge) ”, presented at the Art-Z gallery in Paris. It’s an exclusive moment in which the artist strives to constantly renew memory, rekindle emotions and stimulate reflection.
South African-born British visual artist Bruce Clarke captivates and moves audiences with a moving mix of mediums, including photography, collage and painting. The depth of his work lies not only in this artistic combination, but rather in the poignant subjects he chooses to depict. Tackling tragic and sometimes serious themes, Bruce Clarke depicts them with striking beauty, transforming the emotional dangerousness of his work into what can only be described as “devil’s beauty”.
Open-minded, warm-hearted and curiously eager to discover new things, he demonstrates a refined sense of humor while being connected to an informed network of African and world news. Drawing on his experience of the worst, both directly and through his acute knowledge of contemporary history, he doesn’t hesitate to share these insights through his photographic collages.
Indeed, it is within this ecosystem of injustice, violence and relationships of domination that Bruce Clarke selects the elements necessary for his creations. From photographs to testimonies, he draws on these details to transcribe the unrecognized reality as accurately as possible, in an existential quest that invites the public to take part. The “Créer au Bord du Volcan” exhibition fits perfectly into this approach of “painting dark reality through his art”, where the contemporary artist expertly combines drama and beauty, revealing the chaos of the world through an aesthetic prism that captures the eye.
The faces that emerge from his photographs fascinate with their narratives. Brushed, scratched or clawed, these poignant features seem to engage in a silent conversation, carried along by brushstrokes, waves of watercolor, layers of acrylic and the artist’s characteristic blurring of contours. Adopting a style that is both contemporary and classical, Bruce Clarke follows a long iconographic tradition, demonstrating his mastery of drawing, fresco and watercolor, which he transforms into a manuscript of modernity.
The body, a central pivot in Bruce Clarke’s artistic universe, finds a new resonance in the exhibition “Créer au Bord du Volcan”. Here, the viewer is invited into an immersive experience where landscapes and bodies cohabit in a tragic and poignant dance. Far from a simple return to basics, the works expose ravaged landscapes, devastated forests, desolate plains and blazing battlefields that become powerful metaphors for our tormented times. In each canvas, history lurks, ready to awaken under the lucid gaze of the observer. This lucidity prompts him to redefine the way we see and interpret the world around us.
Adopting a subtle creative approach, the artist explores strategies of indirect representation, challenging the evidence of the photographic image. In this daring act, he unveils a counter-power that illuminates shadowy areas, articulating events in a profoundly new way. In the midst of the “image war”, Bruce Clarke embarks on a personal quest, sifting through his own photographic archives to give these images a second life, while questioning the role of photojournalism and the supposed objectivity that claims to capture reality. It is in this questioning of objectivity that Bruce Clarke expresses himself:
“Over time, the image becomes blurred, worn and faded like a palimpsest. A telescoping with other events, major or otherwise, confuses the reading and confuses the reader.
The photo is copied, recopied, rushed, distorted, because it is told in a thousand approximate ways. A meaning is imposed on it, a discourse that it cannot, in its de facto platitude, contest. It becomes a trace of the traces left behind.
Some of the photos in this exhibition come from Rwanda in August 1994 – just a few weeks after the Tutsi genocide. But they are not a representation of Rwanda in August 1994. Yet they were taken there, and I was there to take them.
Now they’re part of a recomposed past.
Finally, does a photographic image tell the truth, any truth? Perhaps it is no more than an archive out of context, disconnected from what was the hyper-reality of 1994: survivors who (over)lived the horror of horrors.
The visual trace, the photo, is, in short, banal and needs additional information, a re-contextualization, to make sense.
With these photo-collages, I’ve tried to recreate the dreamlike, disturbing atmosphere in which images of reality float in the meanders of memory of other realities and informational distortion. Like my paintings, these compositions are not illustrations of anything, but subjective evocations that prompt reflection rather than information.
Reminiscence here takes the form not just of recalling an event to memory, but of summoning up new images.”
In “Créer au Bord du Volcan”, Bruce Clarke proposes a fusion of art and denunciation. The works on show don’t simply represent the world; they summon it up, turn it upside down and challenge us to think beyond what is shown.