Neil Clements Sings Us Out

“I was interested in the idea that artworks are essentially barriers that exist between the viewer and the artist,” explains Neil Clements in his studio in Govanhill, Glasgow. This is odd from someone so clear on what he aims to achieve with his art. Whatever uncertainty might exist between the viewer and the artist, there is little evidence that Clements harbours any ambiguity when it comes to his own output.

Articulate and efficient in his speech, he systematically marks out the parameters of his work and its reception. He knows how it functions, how it behaves in the gallery, how it forms part of a larger art-historical context. He references minimalist and conceptualist practises of the 1960s, teasing out the subtle differences between the two seemingly divergent attitudes, meanwhile demonstrating his almost encyclopaedic knowledge of contemporary art history.

Originally a painter, Clements has recently introduced elements of text, sound, light, photography and sculpture into his practice. “I’ve always conceived of the sound and the photography works as a sort of method of staging the paintings,” he explains. “It was always about creating a situation where you were challenging the relationship someone will have with painting, which is quite conventional.”

At first Clements’ paintings seem unbearably conventional. They are meticulously executed abstracts on shaped canvases. Normally limited to two colours, often shades of black and white, the paint is applied following the contours of the canvas edge. And yet, despite their formal austerity, there is a degree of camp to these works, a kind of affected machismo.

This is unsurprising seeing as the canvas shapes are based on various guitar models, and more specifically, the angular kind popular among heavy metal guitar heroes. Here Clements marries two seemingly opposing histories, the development of minimalist painting, particularly the introduction of shaped canvases by artists such as Frank Stella, and the pointy-guitar movement, with pioneering designs such as the Gibson Explorer.

Both pursuits share a similar sentiment, according to Clements. “Heavy metal music and Abstract Expressionism were both very earnest,” he says, with their “idea of the single male performer or the idea of the autonomous individual; all the romantic, almost fatalistic attitudes that were attached to this form of work, this kind of approach to making art.”

Despite the prominence of the paintings in his oeuvre, Clements is frank about what they achieve independently: “They are actually quite rhetorical, quite simple things. They only say one thing,” he explains.

The large space in Studio Warehouse, Glasgow, where Clements shows this month, provides him an opportunity to look beyond his paintings’ limited resources and consider how the various exhibits will interact. “I like the idea of by putting this beside this you’re almost countering your own logic. That makes it more complex. And so the viewer then actually – because they’re being faced with all these things – has to gather up and make the average or the aggregate of all the parts.”

It’s in this sense that Clements talks of “staging” an exhibition. He sees art, and his own art in particular, as theatrical or performative. It plays with the affected purity of minimalism and the camp severity of metal music. And the work itself manages, in the end, to span two supposedly disparate characteristics, the austere and the baroque.

This very incongruity not only makes Clements one of the most interesting artists working in Scotland today, but assists in averting any irrefutable interpretation of his work. And despite his ability to be clear and succinct in conversation, he attempts no such transparency when it comes to making art. “I don’t see the point in taking things to a logical conclusion,” he says. And nor should he.