Exhibition
Clive Head Exhibition - National Gallery
Clive Head is one of the leading painters in Britain today. Taking his starting point from the photo-based realist agenda of artists like Richard Estes and Gerhard Richter, Head has extended to concept of realism so that it is no longer concerned with the use of paint to reproduce the language of photography, but takes in the idea of all encompassing and mutifaceted space.
What does all that mean?
Well, instead of mimicking the photograph, with its use of single point perspective which flattens an image, Head envisages a dome of space, extending perhaps 300 degrees around the viewer, so that on the flat canvas you do not simply see what a camera would see in front of you, but the space behind you, as well as above and below you. This is not the same as a fish eye lense, it is a reordering of space which can only exist in the artificial world of the painting. This renders the idea of single point photographic perspective obsolete, as there is no single vanishing point. There are not even multiple vanishing points. Instead there are vanishing zones. What is even more remarkable is the fact these are created exclusively for each individual painting, and are not imposed on every image in the way a camera imposes a single vanishing point on everything it records. Each of Head's paintings is unique in the same way everytime we experience the world as individual human beings, that is unique.
At the same time Head extends the idea of the photographic view, by rejecting the idea of the artist as a static camera. Indeed, the way he moves through a scene, focusing in on some elements, and out of others, seeing round corners and looking at objects from different angles, is more like a movie camera than a single shot camera. In this his work has affinities with the multiple viewpoints of cubism and the kinetic art of futurism, but it is all rendered into the coherent language of realist painting.
This art represents the first unique art movement of the twenty-first century, and although it has roots in the last century, it is also the first genuine break with the modernist tradition that characterised the twentieth century.
Despite the complexity of its theoretical underpinning, the exhibition has broken the attendance records for a contemporary art show at the National Gallery with 17,000 visitors in the first week alone. Many of these are art students, keen to see an art that is spatially complex, well grounded in contemporary critical theory and which deals with the Urgency of Now. This is art for our own age.
