Alain Gerard Clement: A Decade of Photogenic Drawings

Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas, Texas is pleased to announce the opening of Alain Gerard Clement: A Decade of Photogenic Drawings, a survey of the artist’s work from 1996 to the present. An opening reception for the artist will be held on Friday evening, June 23, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. The exhibition continues through Saturday, July 22, 2006.

Featuring dramatic and mysterious images floated within wondrously rich, sepia-toned backgrounds, this ten year survey of photogenic drawings chronicles the work from four key series – the Garden Series, the Medical Series, the Medici Chamber, and the recent War Series. According to Jim Edwards in 1997, "In their classical balance and exquisite luminosity, Clement's images elicit an innocent wonder, which etches its way into our conscious attention. The simple object becomes a mysterious thing, seemingly existing beyond mortal time. His recent photogenic drawings may be as close as one gets in contemporary art to an image of the life of the soul."

Clement’s Garden Series, completed in 2000, was inspired by a trip to North Africa and has been the subject of several exhibitions throughout the country. The Medical Series is an intimate and mysterious narrative of the body and can be seen as a dialogue of aesthetic and moral poetry. The works in the Medici Chamber offer a refuge where one can retreat, experience, and contemplate. Conceived in early 2001, the War Series encompasses a body of work dictated not by the inspiration that has presided the artist’s other works, but rather appeared as a premonition.  

Alain Gerard Clement began making photographs in 1972, followed by a decade long exploration of the photogram in the 1980’s. In the early 1990’s, the artist adapted the original photogenic drawing technique and process of W.H.F. Talbot, (1800-1877). Clement's innovation is more personalized and specific - using his drawings as negatives and exposing them directly to photo-sensitive paper. Clement attended The University of Dijon, France receiving a law degree in 1968 with additional post graduate studies in 1970. He lived and worked in Paris and moved to New York in 1978.  

He has received several prestigious awards including the National Endowment for Arts (1998) and a Creative Artist Program Award (1986-1987) from the Cultural Arts Council of Houston and Harris County.  Recent exhibitions include displays at The Galveston Art Center, Galveston, Texas; the Carnegie Art Museum in Oxnard, CA; the El Paso Museum of Art in El Paso, Texas; The Art Gallery at the University of California at San Diego; and the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas.

His work resides in many private and public collections such as; The Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, France; The Musée Nicèphore Niepce in Chalon-sur-Saone, France; The Menil Collection in Houston, Texas; Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas; the Dallas Museum of Art in Dallas, Texas; and the El Paso Museum of Art in El Paso, Texas.  Clement currently resides on the Gulf Coast in Texas.