CLEMENT PHILIPPE

Portfolio Categories: Artists.

Entropy, dispersal, corrosion, imprint, trace, compression, leak, zone, border, defeat, confinement.
This is a not exhaustive list of my visual work’s components, organized around the notion of accident and its informative treatment. From the thrown-out piece because of a micron default to the Chernobyl disaster, crystallizing a huge questioning, I propose plastic shapes dealing the multiple facets of these transformations.

More generally, my artwork focuses itself on the effects and the products of the industrialization. Every industrial system seems to involve containment, control of energies and materials and as for any system, the infallibility can never be possible. As a consequence, I choose to explore these systematic weaknesses through various scales as well as the individual behaviours when facing the sand grain in the gears which could make the machine derail. For that reason, the concept of entropy which measures the degree of chaos present in a system, is an essential point in my visual approach of places, objects or stories I am dealing with.

Starting from defects, rubbishes and accidents, I try to find a poetic shape to fill the blanks left by the derailments, taking part in any artificial productions. Progressing by the empirical experiment of materials, always connected to an industry or to a precise exploitation, some artworks evolve, revealing some kind of self-destruction (Reggane, Under Destruction). The self-destructive art manifesto (1959) and its inseparable counterpart, the self-creative art, was for me a point of seesaw. So the work of the artist Gustav Metzger, who wrote those manifestoes, is kind of a milestone in my understanding of contemporary art.

As a consequence, my artwork may be considered as many thoughts and observations about the Promethean myth of the technological tools control and of its limits.