OLIVER CLEGG
EVERYONE HAS A PLAN, UNTIL THEY GET PUNCHED IN THE FACE
October 20 – November 2 2023
Strange comes in degrees.
It’s not a coincidence that we think of summer and winter as solid-state nouns, while spring and fall are verbs that are as active as you can get. That’s not just because we see spring and fall as times of transition: the actual duration of daylight changes much faster around the equinoxes and slower at the solstices, so spring springs and fall falls much faster.
Of course, spring springs up with summer light — fall falls down into the nightly, whitely crib death of winter, filling late October with a sense of dread. Is it any accident that we have a holiday for whistling in the darkling gloom?
Oliver Clegg does not paint for Halloween alone. But his latest show of work, which opens October 20th and will be on view over the holiday, skews surreally towards the season’s darkling imagination, with a handful and eyeful of imagery designed to both soothe and disturb — a magnified eyeball, a disembodied, seven-fingered hand, a dying ghost and, maybe least unsettling of all, a flowing, flying ghost right out of a vintage boys’ book of horror stories.
Clegg was born and schooled in art history in the U.K. and painting in Italy; after stints living and working in Cornwall and New York, he’s now a resident of Costa Rica. Clegg is a throwback to the time when an art history education didn’t begin with radical discourses on postwar ontologies. As he recalls it, his own study of art history started centuries earlier, went up to surrealism and stopped, leaving students to study the 20th century in other courses.
But it was meant to be: Clegg’s nascent feeling for a conceptual approach had already become beguiled by modernist talents like the objet trouvé radicalism of Marcel Duchamp and the flawless, eerie pictorialism of Salvador Dali, the stark dreaminess of Giorgio de Chirico. And as his painting practice grew, it began to develop its own stance, standing on an unusual tripod of legs — the chiaroscuro modernism of Edouard Manet, the clever surrealism of Rene Magritte and the sentimental realism of Norman Rockwell.
Carefully seeking out elements like childhood toys and nostalgic icons and recontextualizing them in a sly but sinister way, Clegg has developed his own brand of magical realism. He has done this literally, using found panels of wood to paint on rather than canvas and combing flea markets for interesting tokens and trinkets to picture in his works. He has a special genius for finding things that blur the line between being special to him and being special to everyone —following George Bernard Shaw’s famous dictum, “The more personal, the more universal.”
His latest works delve even more into the person-iversal. Painted in oil on spare, squarish but irregular pieces of formaleta, leftover wood from construction of his house there, the group of seven new paintings balances desolation and hope on a knife point — epitomized in the image of a flower blooming out of a rock in a valley of stone. But as tempting as it is to read some message about whistling in the dark in such imagery, Clegg’s aim is more to reach back through adulthood and adolescence to the truest fount of plastic inspiration — childhood — when wonderful and weird and terrible things can occur and mingle without any final interpretation being laid down in stone.
As in the great novels of “lo real maravilloso” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Isabel Allende, art is neither a happy escape nor a damnation of humanity. In their own way, Clegg’s old-school oils are rather contemporary — reminders to look without judging; to imagine without concluding; to feel without knowing.
Not that knowing is a bad thing, per se. It’s just nice to have options.
– David Colman
Oliver Clegg was born in Guildford, United Kingdom in 1980. He received a BFA from Bristol University in Bristol, United Kingdom, and a MFA from the City and Guilds of London Art School in London, United Kingdom.
Clegg's recent solo and group exhibitions include "The Last Great Painting" at Martos Gallery in New York, New York (2023); "Tongue-Tied" at MAMOTH Contemporary in London, United Kingdom (2022); "We Cat" at Tennis Elbow at The Journal Gallery in New York, New York (2021); "Good Pictures" at Jeffrey Deitch in New York, New York (2020); Tennis Elbow at The Journal Gallery in New York, New York (2019); "Oliver Clegg : Euclid's Porsche" at Rental Gallery, New York, New York (2018); "Everything Should be OK" at Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai, United Arab Emirates (2016); and "Whats up" at Soho, London, United Kingdom (2016).
Oliver Clegg lives and works in Santa Theresa, Costa Rica.
Strange comes in degrees.
It’s not a coincidence that we think of summer and winter as solid-state nouns, while spring and fall are verbs that are as active as you can get. That’s not just because we see spring and fall as times of transition: the actual duration of daylight changes much faster around the equinoxes and slower at the solstices, so spring springs and fall falls much faster.
Of course, spring springs up with summer light — fall falls down into the nightly, whitely crib death of winter, filling late October with a sense of dread. Is it any accident that we have a holiday for whistling in the darkling gloom?
Oliver Clegg does not paint for Halloween alone. But his latest show of work, which opens October 20th and will be on view over the holiday, skews surreally towards the season’s darkling imagination, with a handful and eyeful of imagery designed to both soothe and disturb — a magnified eyeball, a disembodied, seven-fingered hand, a dying ghost and, maybe least unsettling of all, a flowing, flying ghost right out of a vintage boys’ book of horror stories.
Clegg was born and schooled in art history in the U.K. and painting in Italy; after stints living and working in Cornwall and New York, he’s now a resident of Costa Rica. Clegg is a throwback to the time when an art history education didn’t begin with radical discourses on postwar ontologies. As he recalls it, his own study of art history started centuries earlier, went up to surrealism and stopped, leaving students to study the 20th century in other courses.
But it was meant to be: Clegg’s nascent feeling for a conceptual approach had already become beguiled by modernist talents like the objet trouvé radicalism of Marcel Duchamp and the flawless, eerie pictorialism of Salvador Dali, the stark dreaminess of Giorgio de Chirico. And as his painting practice grew, it began to develop its own stance, standing on an unusual tripod of legs — the chiaroscuro modernism of Edouard Manet, the clever surrealism of Rene Magritte and the sentimental realism of Norman Rockwell.
Carefully seeking out elements like childhood toys and nostalgic icons and recontextualizing them in a sly but sinister way, Clegg has developed his own brand of magical realism. He has done this literally, using found panels of wood to paint on rather than canvas and combing flea markets for interesting tokens and trinkets to picture in his works. He has a special genius for finding things that blur the line between being special to him and being special to everyone —following George Bernard Shaw’s famous dictum, “The more personal, the more universal.”
His latest works delve even more into the person-iversal. Painted in oil on spare, squarish but irregular pieces of formaleta, leftover wood from construction of his house there, the group of seven new paintings balances desolation and hope on a knife point — epitomized in the image of a flower blooming out of a rock in a valley of stone. But as tempting as it is to read some message about whistling in the dark in such imagery, Clegg’s aim is more to reach back through adulthood and adolescence to the truest fount of plastic inspiration — childhood — when wonderful and weird and terrible things can occur and mingle without any final interpretation being laid down in stone.
As in the great novels of “lo real maravilloso” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Isabel Allende, art is neither a happy escape nor a damnation of humanity. In their own way, Clegg’s old-school oils are rather contemporary — reminders to look without judging; to imagine without concluding; to feel without knowing.
Not that knowing is a bad thing, per se. It’s just nice to have options.
– David Colman
Oliver Clegg was born in Guildford, United Kingdom in 1980. He received a BFA from Bristol University in Bristol, United Kingdom, and a MFA from the City and Guilds of London Art School in London, United Kingdom.
Clegg's recent solo and group exhibitions include "The Last Great Painting" at Martos Gallery in New York, New York (2023); "Tongue-Tied" at MAMOTH Contemporary in London, United Kingdom (2022); "We Cat" at Tennis Elbow at The Journal Gallery in New York, New York (2021); "Good Pictures" at Jeffrey Deitch in New York, New York (2020); Tennis Elbow at The Journal Gallery in New York, New York (2019); "Oliver Clegg : Euclid's Porsche" at Rental Gallery, New York, New York (2018); "Everything Should be OK" at Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai, United Arab Emirates (2016); and "Whats up" at Soho, London, United Kingdom (2016).
Oliver Clegg lives and works in Santa Theresa, Costa Rica.