Art and You Blog

Charles Clary, who is now exhibiting his artworks at Galerie Evolution Pierre Cardin, is a SCAD  student (Savannah, GA). Art and You met him and asked him a few questions.


What could you tell us about your artworks ?

The all aspect of the world is musically based. I used to be a precaution instructor, a music instructor. So think of it as this world set as underneath others worlds, and they run parallalel to one another. So this world functions in the same way than our does, but there's no hate, no anger. It's very playful, interactive. They all kind of based their reality on our own, but take everything that we do wrong, and make it right.
It's all created of cut paper. So, in a word, the cut paper comes out the wall so far so that the viewer can have more interaction with it, more so than just a painting on the wall. Because if it's just a painting, it's like a documentation or something. If I actually cut the paper and make it come out, and you can go in and out of it, this is actual creation of the world. So you can kind of sustain your disbelief, and put yourself into this environment. So you feel like you're a part of this world.


Are they installations, or sculptures ?

It's a mixture of both. To make it easy, it's more of a wall installation, because it's made of so many different pieces that you pretty much have to install on the wall. It's not just a kind of rectangular pieces you have to hang. It's like 5 or 6 different panels that play off on one another and create this kind of flow up against the wall, that could creep and infect or infest the space.


Where does your inspiration come from ?

It's based on microbiology, like viruses, and topographical landmaps. Like if you look at caverns, and mountains and anything like that, they're just different layers, and that's what i'm working on : different layers of fiction. We have great actions of color, so it goes from dark all the way to light. You get that kind of elevation changes, so that you know that the highest point of this world is here, and the lowest point could be here. It looks like it goes back more further than he actually does, so you can picture this it goes back miles, but it's only that deep. So it's based on a microscopic level, but it's also based on reality of a land formations.


And which artists inspire you ?

There's an artist named Janne Stark who works in the same kind of paper that I work with, there's a lady named Jane South. Takashi Murakami is a huge inspiration. There's an artist named Jeff Sotto, also Matthew Ritchie, artists of that nature are a huge inspiration to me. Some of them are working paper, some of them installations, more so than painting or sculpture and I try to look at the way that they engage the viewer, like how you look at the piece. Because that's super important. I want you to be able to get your way through the piece, than just look at it on the wall. You can come up cloose, stand further back.


How does it feel about exhibiting in such a place, in Paris ?

I'm still in Academia and I just had my thesis show, which was a solo exhibition in Savannah (Georgia) and this is my first international solo show outside the school. I mean, I showed in several group exhibitions, in New York, in California, Tennessee, Atlanta, places like that but I'm very humble about this opportunity. When Pierre Cardin buy the first piece I ever done like this, it was very exciting, because I didn't think that this piece was gonna sell, just because it was so large : it was 45 feet by 8 feet tall.
And then, when opportunity came that he offered this space to show my works, I was completely astonished because, I'm still pretty young, I'm only 28, and still in school. And be able to have an opportunity to come to Paris, which is my first international travel ever, to have a solo exhibition here, is a once-in-a-life time opportunity. It was a lot of fun to figure out how to navigate and maximize the space with all the pieces I brought with me. Because I can't engage colum areas, arch ways. So it's been an amazing experience.




[Visuel : Charles Clary, Double Diddle Fermentation (detail) 2008. Acrylic, graphite, and hand cut paper on panel. Dimensions Variable. Courtesy of the artist]