Exhibitions
Wellington

MARTIN EDMOND

PHILIP CLAIRMONT Paintings

The identification of. the demonic as Philip Clairmont's territory has been made before. This remains one of the states of the mind he is entering into and pushing through in his work. However, some of the work in his one-man-show at Elva Bett's shows a definite tendency toward celebration and toward the ecstatic as a domain of power and revelation.

It isn't a question of a difference in tone, or of a lowering of intensity. Nor do the new works demonstrate. a change in vocabulary. And it's hard to talk of a shift in emphasis in the work of an artist who is always totally emphatic. To Give Blazing Light is the writing across the top of one large canvas: and it seemed to me that an ass and a gay cockerel pushed their heads through an opening door, into the front of the painting. Like an entry of new spirits into the pantheon of this particular cosmology?

It is also true that the interior world Clairmont has been painting for a long time now, opens up to the Outside at various points in these paintings. There is a view through a window to washing on the clothes-line; there are two sets of French doors giving out to Phoenix palms in the garden in another work. Both these are flooded with light. Yet there is this reservation, stated by the Painter: I'm not really interested in the sun, I just want to spread a little light around. There is also the question of compensation. The canvas called Lampstand was made in the darkness of Clairmont's garage studio under artificial light. Pinned out on the wall of that garage in the afternoon sunlight, its electric yellows shine out beyond any natural intensity.

PHILIP CLAIRMONT Large Hexagonal Table 1976-77
oil on canvas (Elva Bett Gallery)

With the odd window opening to views of the outside, you get also a clear illusion of perceptual depth. There is an equation drawn between the properties of this illusion and the nature of tradition. In the small painting With regrets, to Monet, a field of flowers with trees behind it, gets torn up and pieces of the Monet print become part of a view through a window, along with the mutating light and roaring colours. So that a slight but definite sadness attends this picture at least. Life used to be so simple: but moving on you find in the title of another work the only probable answer to this brief look with an impressionist eye. Thus: Ain't no aesthetics here, man. Or, again, another painting of the lampstand titled With El Greco on my mind featuring a wash of that bony purple-white light through the canvas. An aerial vision of early time. Like a bat flying out of the speaker cabinet.

It needs to be said at this point, that the strict formal control Clairmont has always exercised over his compositions remains. He still has that trick of framing chaos in mirrors, on the backs of doors, through windows or wardrobe doors. His vocabulary of forms is still made up of the ordinary objects of daily and intimate use, upon which he focuses intensities of colour and vision. But there is something of a loosening up to be noted in some of these works. It becomes an admission, not so much of midnight terrors, but of light, the blazing light of the orders of ecstasy. The relaxation of control is consequent.

Through an open window the clothes hung on the line twist with their own motion, and clothes-pegs detach into the air becoming eyes. Clairmont's vision is kinetic: he moves fast, Ouspensky-like, scattering eyes as he goes through the warps of time and space, so that the complex planes of his canvases collapse outwards and resolve finally towards a single surface whose dimensions are at once illumination and annihilation. Ouspensky wrote:
Later you will learn that the practice of self-remembering. . . changes the subtlest part of our metabolism and produces definite chemical, or perhaps it is better to say alchemical, effects in our body. So today from psychology we have come to alchemy; that is, to the idea of transformation of coarse elements into finer ones.

This note was written before the exhibition was hung. It is therefore about works still in progress. It was not certain that all the works discussed here would appear in the show at Elva Bett's. Those that do may yet appear in a different form. But then, there is no still point from which to view Clairmont's work - no way of stopping the battle.

Originally published in Art New Zealand 5 April/May 1977