Neil Clements
Doggerfisher gallery
23 April - 6 June 2009

"Based around a sustained exploration of the nature of formalism, Clements’ practice explores the need to reduce something down to its pure, essential nature: an idea that greatly influenced much art of the 1960s and 70s. He describes his shaped canvases as a type of process painting that is as much about the legacy of abstraction as it is about musical references. He says: ‘I am very conscious that because of the shaped canvases people think I am interested in the anti-authoritive connotations or subcultural value of heavy metal, but really I am attracted to the idea of the overt theatricality implicit within the music, and how this could be used as a device to explore the theatricality of large scale abstraction. I was unsure with those works, whether I should tell people that they were based on guitar designs, because I am quite comfortable with them being read as shaped canvases: slippage occurs between the idea and the object.’"

taken from here....