YVES CLERC

Yves Clerc is inspired and always flirting with the fashion industry, the theatre and dance, but also the Florentine Mannerists or the Baroque paintings of the Cuzco School, as well as from a more recent period works by Albers. He numbers his work chronologically; this number is both the title and the signature. This ‘numeric title’ is always situated in exactly the same place in all of his work: on a five-centimeter black band incorporated into the frame underneath the painting. It is a reference to Renée Magritte’s famous work: ‘This is not a Pipe’.

Clerc created and mastered a painting technique where he superposes multiple layers which result in the paintings having the appearance of texture and depth. It is reminiscent of pointillism, but instead of dots, it is an endless series of small dashes of paint. The artist is always delighted to see admirers getting up-close inspecting the intriguing texture and colors of his work. Nonetheless, conscious of the importance of the conceptual in today’s artistic environment, Yves Clerc abandoned the abstract in favor of the figurative. ‘To be frank, what I sought was a paradox: I was seeking something that was figurative, but at the same time other than figurative, something that was offbeat and entirely new; something that was realistic, but at the same time anything but real.’

Yves Clerc is a mannerist artiste, he does not wish to imitate what is real, but rather tries to represent a vision of the world, where his art is rendered apparent by elongated forms, the saturation of colors and the tension of postures. A painting is like a door, a place of passage between two worlds, the real world and the represented one. Freed from these constraints and following a very personal path Yves Clerc has explored a series of themes dealing with appearance and how appearance is presented, and in doing so, to some extent bring the idea of the figurative full circle.

The Bailly Gallery has a long-standing collaborative history with the artist, since 1990 the Bailly Gallery has held a regular exposition of the artists’ work in Paris and Geneva.