Etienne Clément FRench, b. 1965

When it comes to creative play, there are two types of children. Those who build structures, be they complex towers in their minds or structures with Meccano, and those who build stories; not that the two are mutually exclusive but in play they often polarise. The child’s theatre, a cardboard interior often made in the form of a pop-up book, becomes the ultimate non-architectural space. It is all innards and no architectonic structure. It is all dress and no frame, whilst the Meccano tower is the essence of rationalised integrity with little space for humanity. This of course is an unacceptable dichotomy. Etienne Clément’s intensely alluring but deviously complex works weave these two types of play together. The formal drama of architecture abuts the personal and political allegories of his “playmobilesque” narratives. They jar, when Clément wants them to and then merge in a tricksy fashion when he wants to entice the viewer into closer communion.

Clément is a story-smith. Ingredients for his narratives are both fact and fiction. It allows him to make up stories, to start legends in any particular place he chooses. He builds up stories combining either solid and verified historical events or mythological/biblical themes and outright pure invention. The outcome, a new story where the fact/fiction boundaries are blurred. His works investigate the legendary, creating narratives that are never being entirely believed by the viewer, but also never being resolutely doubted. They examine the suspended state of uncertainty.

Visually they displace the viewer, disrupting their perception of ‘real’ or ‘unreal’, ‘staged’ or ‘un-staged’.  His theatres become a place to freely construct, a site for play and an area of experimentation. His carefully constructed tableaux provide selective reference points to the real world, making it increasingly difficult for viewers to understand their position within that world and thus creating a displaced sense of certainty.

Miniature figures inhabit Clément’s tableaux. Most are plastic, the sexiness of plastic mixing with its pathetic ephemerality. However, once the figures are enlarged and taken from their symbolic, generic meaningless and given their place at the centre of the melodrama, a change takes place. From their mass produced absurdity, via the depth of their surface, emerges a certain profundity. Acting as touchstones for contemporary desire, the figurines in Clément’s works invite you to question the hierarchy of truth that is placed on all narratives, objects and places.

Recently, Clément has been looking into presenting his work as tableau vivant using performers to re-enact his miniature sets narratives. To achieve pictorial excellence, Clément uses the best equipment available to reflect his world from several perspectives. He takes the square photographs with his Hasselblad 6x6 cm camera and uses a Plaubel 20x25 cm camera for the rectangular tableaux. With both formats, he shoot on negative. The Hasselblad is easier to handle but the Plaubel gives more control over the depth of field and other adjustments.

Clément’s work has been widely exhibited in the UK, at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, in the Jerwood Space, at Bloomberg’s ArtFutures, the Architectural Association, the RIBA Gallery, the Geffrye Museum and the V&A Museum of Childhood in London. He also has exhibited at Danysz Gallery in Paris.

He has showed work at the Printmakers Gallery Edinburgh alongside the likes of the Chapman Brothers, Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol. Etienne Clément was born in Paris and studied at La Sorbonne and l’Ecole du Louvre. He was a prize winner in the European Architectural Photographer of the Year 1997.

He is an artist member of the Contemporary Art Society (CAS). He recently opened an art space Les Fêtes Galantes de London Fields in London where he lives and works.

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