Radiant as the End of the World

2022-2023

Modra Rijeka, oil on canvas, 130x110 cm, 2023

In seiner künstlerischen Praxis beschäftigt sich Clément Bedel mit der Konzeptualisierung futuristischer Landschaften in einem post-apokalyptischen Kontext. Indem er die Dimensionen unseres Ökosystems erkundet, welches wiederholt durch menschliches Eingreifen beeinträchtigt wurde, hinterfragt Bedel den Begriff der Natur. Er sucht nach innovativen Ansätzen zur Verteidigung, zum Ausdruck und zur Evolution und umfasst eine potenziell unendliche Reihe von unterschiedlichen Hyperobjekten. Posthumanistische Umgebungen treffen auf brutalistische Architekturformen, die sich mit metamorphosierten Naturphänomenen überschneiden, während der Künstler sich von wissenschaftlichen Spekulationen über die Ästhetik des Planeten in alternativen Zeitlinien inspirieren lässt.

In einer Welt, die zunehmend von Bildschirmen umgeben und von der Unmittelbarkeit der sozialen Medien, ihrem schnellen Wandel und dem allgegenwärtigen Einfluss der künstlichen Intelligenz dominiert wird, sieht Bedel die Malerei und deren Praxis als eine Form des Widerstands. Tief in das Handwerk eingetaucht, findet sich der Künstler in eine andere zeitliche Dimension versetzt. Die Vorbereitung der Medien und die Umwandlung der Rohmaterialien rufen eine besondere Zeitlichkeit hervor, die sich in den fertigen Gemälden widerspiegelt. Im ständigen Dialog mit der Leinwand baut Bedel Schichten auf und erkundet unaufhörlich Formen – ein kontinuierliches Spiel des Experimentierens mit Gestalt und Farbe.

Während des gesamten Prozesses rotiert Bedel die Leinwand kontinuierlich und erzeugt absichtlich Desorientierung und stellt damit etablierte und konditionierte Wahrnehmungen von Landschaften, die mit menschlichen Instinkten verbunden sind, in Frage. Mit diesem Vorgehen ermöglicht der Künstler die Entdeckung einzigartiger Kombinationen, die sonst unerforscht bleiben würden, und setzt sich somit mit verschiedenen Perspektiven von Tiefe und Raum auseinander. Eine kognitive Dissonanz folgt, die in den Betrachter*innen Gefühle hervorrufen, die beunruhigend, möglicherweise sogar verstörend sind. Seine künstlerische Praxis bewegt sich auf einer zarten Grenze innerhalb des Mediums, oszillierend zwischen Abstraktion und Figuration, und bewahrt so eine inhärente Spannung.

Innerhalb einer neuen Ära des Anthropozän-Diskurses sind Bedels Gemälde Landschaften, in denen etablierte Praktiken transformiert werden—klimatische Probleme und Themen wie Machtlosigkeit angesichts der bevorstehenden Katastrophe werden angesprochen und genutzt. Der Maler strebt danach, die Zukunft durch seine Gemälde zu erfassen, zu verstehen, zu visionieren und vielleicht sogar „vorherzusehen“. Im Kampf mit einem tiefen Gefühl des „Weltschmerzes“ angesichts der aktuellen ökologischen Krise sucht der Künstler eine Wiederverzauberung der Welt, während er sich in einem tiefen Dialog mit sich selbst und seiner Umgebung befindet.

Reflektierend in Hinblick auf Timothy Mortons Aussage, dass „das Ende der Welt bereits eingetreten ist,“ wandeln sich die Mittel zur Bewältigung existenzieller Kämpfe innerhalb seiner Kunst zu einer suchenden Kritik, die eine umfassendere Sicht auf die Natur fördert und ein utopisches Bild einfängt, das möglicherweise (noch) nicht wirklich existiert.

Text von Livia Klein - 2024

Radiant as the End of the World, Hestia Belgrade, Serbia - December 2022 - March 2023

“Anthropocene” is the proposed name for a geologic epoch in which humans have become the major force determining the continuing livability of the Earth. Living arrangements that took millions of years to put into place are being undone in the blink of an eye.

The massive increase in carbon dioxide, methane or nitrate emissions into the atmosphere from industrialized agriculture, petroleum-driven production and globalized transportation networks has outpaced all rhythms of life. Yet this whirlwind is best recognized through immersion in various small and situated rhythms. Big stories take their form from seemingly minor contingencies and asymmetrical encounters in its moments of uncertainty. Clément Bedel through his art reminds us that we live in an impossible present - a time of rupture, a world haunted with the threat of extinction. His paintings offer vibrant scenes of more-than-human attempts to stay alive. Motions that he is depicting are whispers of the many pasts and yet-to-comes that surround us. Considered through his canvases - the world has ended many times before. Bedel’s paintings approach this problem by offering visual attention to overlaid arrangements of nature’s resilience. These canvases are also preyed upon by radiant, striking, sharp strokes of oil paint that travel in depicted water and soil; polluting the air; getting inside the plants and trees with dazzling, intense colors and mutation of contort formations. We cannot see it but we learn to find its traces. It disturbs us in its indeterminacy; this is a quality of ghosts.

Many species stronger than time - potentially immortal filamentous fungi, photosynthetic algae or cyanobacteria - spread and meet on the gravestones of brutalistic man made cement vestiges. The ghosts of multi metabolic landscapes unsettle our conventional sense of time, where we measure and manage one thing leading to another. What Bedel presents are examples of what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects” - entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what nature and time should be. When we notice their tempo, rather than impose ours, they open us to the possibility of a different aspect of livability. This series of paintings question the logical foundation of the ecological crisis, which is suffused with the melancholy and negativity of coexistence, and is offering the evolvement into something playful, anarchic, and unpretentiously witty. His oeuvre is a skilled fusion of phenomenology of Aposematism and biology of Batesian mimicry, fueled by ambition to reestablish our ties to nonhuman beings and to help us rediscover the hope and joy that can brighten the dark, bizarre loop we traverse. Change is constant. The world is in a continual state of flux. It is a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steeling ourselves against such modulation, Clément Bedel invites us to feel, map, assess and grasp from the swirling pathways around us in order to better understand and influence them as they happen. This is a frank, luminous set of dispatches from future systems and fractured pasts, based equally on art, science and science fiction, an incantation to transform what ultimately transforms us.

Anja Tončić, 2022

Affection / Aerial corrosion, 90x70 cm, 2023

Interview for Journal.rs with Dunja Jovanović - 11th January 2023

Why did you start to address the problem of the ecological crisis through the narrative of your paintings?

The awareness of the problems regarding the ecological crisis and more importantly the atrophy of nature and its visible and tangible traces around me is something that has constituted myself since way before I started my art practice. I grew up in a mountainous rural area in France and the connection with the ecosystem around me is so- mething that formed me fundamentally. Even as a well-preserved environment compared to a lot of places on earth, I could experience the disappearing of most birds, insects, the spreading of only one type of tree, blocking diversity in many ways. I paint, I am a painter and through the painting process I have always relived, commented, grieved or offered singular perspectives in my own dealing with the problems that are often way above my physical strength, knowledge, education or capability. On the level that we are living through, most of the damage around us is irreversible and terrifyingly advanced that I started raising questions in the direction of “What will happen AFTER?” How will nature seem, how will it persist, change, fight as we get closer to the “end”? I am not afraid to offer a platform of an “end” in my works, but the end as I perceive it is precisely a livability where human touch is erased from the podium, where nature had persevered as there are just human vestiges left. Where other living forms, old and new, endured in a glory and variety of fascinating forms of resistance and bio mutation.

In what way do you think art like yours raises awareness about environmental problems?

My artworks aim is to seize and make visible the flow and flux of processes of a quickly changing world where the environment is going through rapid stress and aggression, but not via the usual dystopian imagery borrowed from somewhere else, or methods that do not belong to my core. My role is not to give lessons, but to uplift the awareness of possibility to approach the environmental problems from a bigger focus on nature’s phenomenology of Aposematism and biology of Batesian mimicry, fueled by ambition to reestablish our ties to nonhuman beings and to help rediscover the aspiration and joy that can brighten the dark, bizarre loop we traverse. All that by the means of centuries old but ever-lasting painting process and its influence on both artist and the recipient, that did not change regardless of the collision with digital media deluge and instant consummation rampage of our time. In more than one way, the process of “creation” and “degradation” of the surface of canvas requires months or years of time, unpredictability, risk, loss, non-replicability, generosity, and more than all - honesty. And that can be felt. That is why I reckon it has never been more relevant to include the paintings into the course of actions as well, with which we can make people change by feeling the captured change, offering a dialogue without condemnation.

Back in 2007, Chicago curator and early supporter of environmental art, Stephanie Smith, warned that the plethora of environmental exhibitions could serve to appease visitors and improve the image of galleries and museums, but nothing more. If sustainability or climate change become the artistic trend du jour, we risk providing palliatives for ourselves and audiences without truly contributing to artistic production, nuanced debate, or lasting social change. What do you think about this?

I fully agree that treating climate changes’ ongoing problems became a peculiar trend in artistic approaches, and that the boundary of it being necessary or simply redundant is frequently indecipherable given the complexion of art scene distinctness itself and its role nowadays, which is often exploited or simply capitalized on. My stand is that it is very important for artists to focus on the honesty of their practice, developing lines of actions, to create and not to stay stuck with attitudes. I believe diverse ways to approach the environmental issues of the time shouldn’t be overlooked and disqualified morally and conceptually as they bring more depth and artistic quality to the matter. The constant chameleon-changing colors in accordance with hot topics and shallow engagements fitting current narratives for the sake of selfish goals is what prevents nuances and lasting progress.

Apart from the subject matter, do you also want to make your artistic practices more sustainable (recyclable canvases, natural colors, seeing accounts in the studio, choosing galleries...)?

In the way I am practicing oil painting the sense of craft and respect for the rules and conditions with which painters worked for centuries is important. This practice necessitate very specific ingredients and formulas to be respected in order to be long-lasting. It was always a process close to nature, and of course thankfully, science and awareness for the toxicity of certain elements to the environment, but also to the painter himself got removed. For example, many products whose ingredients include heavy metals, such as cadmium, cobalt, or lead, have been reformulated with laboratory-produced substitutes that lessen the potential harm. On top of this I am using raw linen canvases with linen being a fabric that is organically processed without chemicals or intensive dyes, so no water pollution is made either in the process. Also, the entire flax plant of linen can be woven into a fiber, which means that almost no waste is left over from the spinning and weaving process, if you walk through the field of flax you will notice it is alive with wildlife, helping promote biodiversity and soil regeneration, which is not the case with cotton or other fabrics used in common painting canvases. Worth mentioning among the rest is that “MoToCo”, the organization in which I am a resident in France, put initiative and effort to introduce the drainage system that recuperates all of the oil or resin residue leftovers, preventing the contamination of the nearby water sources.

What other steps can artists take to ensure that their work and involvement in environmental issues is meaningful and that could have an impact?

I believe a lot of the responsibility for art to have a meaningful impact on the environmental issues falls on the choice of the art world and what surrounds it to choose, push, educate or promote some artists rather than other. Too often an artist ability to write complicated text with savant wording, their social background or the art school they went to is what is defining their success. Despite that context I believe that the honesty of the practice and its core importance to the artist himself is the most crucial. For that, one should try to not be discouraged by some of the pressure of our time, financial difficulties among others. What is at stake here, is not loosing and recovering the connection between the contemporary art and the public. I believe people entering a gallery or museum should feel uplifted by the commitment of the artist to his work. It should help feed their curiosity, open their mind, connect them to themselves and to the world, something outside of them that resonates with them. That way, showing care, commitment and craft, art and artists could help empower people to have a profound change and impact on their life and the environment surrounding them. It is a collective work.

Detail - Heartbeats, oil on canvas, 280x387 cm, 2022