Clement Joe Simonnet

Simonnet's Mirage Series:

Everything as nothing. The art of the imperceptible... I have often wondered what is going on in Simonnet's paintings. His insistance on the 'mirage'. The mists of colour. Pigment suspended in acrylic medium. The water that evaporates as the paint dries. 

Why does a digital image on web page tells me nothing other than a superficial 'look'. Machine made ghost of a painted object, a thing, the residue of an event.

Why do I insist on the need to see the painting ? 

What do we think we will find ? 

Pretty colours to go with the furnishing? Like Pollock's painting appearing with a fashion model in Vogue, a photograph taken by Cecile Beaton at Betty Parson's Gallery in 1950? Does all abstract painting thread the dangerous line of the house and garden ?

But what if I said Simonnet's Paintings are not abstract ? What if I said he is a realist? What could be the nature of this reality we speak of ? 

Our everyday understanding of existential reality is for the perceptible. But as Sartre observed in "Being and nothingness", when you go, as appointed to meet your lover at an agreed cafe bar at 4 p.m. and as you enter and scan the place and find they are not there, all you are aware of is their absence, the "not being". Suddenly, everything in the cafe is consigned to oblivion. The tables, the chairs, the decor, the staff, the customers... The space is filled by the absence.

Ours is a world of absence. Never has the actual world of humans ever been so empty. We have created deserts. Of Facebook, google, tweeting, selfies on your phone. A void.

Simonnet's work is the world of illusion. The imperceptible made real.

But this is a long way from Pollock's disembodied gesture of existential humanity, or Mark Rothko's clouds of anxiety, coloured veils for post war tears. 

Simonnet is a Painter of the 21st century. His vision is the light that fills our void. This is not dark matter, this is an aurora that light our universe. Cosmic Dust. The digital world explodes. Like the the interior of the café bar without my lover. 

Text by Alan Graham Dick 

London // April 2016