Clément Dupont, Untitled, 2026
© The artist
Clément Dupont, Saké, 2025
© The artist
Clément Dupont, Untitled, 2026
© The artist
Clément Dupont, 3333, 2026
© The artist
This text accompanies the solo show of the artist <about:blank>
See also
<about:blank>
Website of the artist
Clément Dupont
Observing Clément Dupont's work over nearly ten years, I see him gliding elegantly from his inclination toward painting — weighted with the full burden of its History — toward an unconventional blending of graphic design vocabulary. A subtle back-and-forth fusion that also allows him to integrate the studio and its trappings into his work, alongside typography and its communicative uses. <blank>
I distinguish in his new paintings a faithful balance between the comforting motifs of his medium, the belated arrival of the self-portrait — with all the complexity that subject carries — and genre scenes, such as the recent series featuring dogs. I also see how tension drives him. Clément Dupont grants himself constant learning, notably during his stay in Japan, which reawakened drawing and materiality through the ancestral tradition of woodblock printing. The artist questions the multiplicity between art and craft, rigor and love of technique, the will to do well and digital interaction, glitch. He claims all these appetites within the contemporaneity of his age and his century. <blank>
Calm, patience, slowness, attention — I unfurl this almost hypnotic attitude in his way of working, of savoring the layers, pictorial and chromatic. I place "the background" back at the center here, or how the artist — in a historical continuity of his medium — spends many hours before finalizing his grounds. Discreetly, the dominant color comes to neutralize the others. The indefinable, monotone beige of the recent canvases nonetheless carries within it shades of green, pink, yellow, orange, and gold (what a family!). And it is only through the use of glazing and contemplative attention that the eye perceives, then admits, the plurality of hues, the kick of the sometimes biting colors of the underlayers — this millefeuille within the artist's work.
Clément Dupont integrates images into his painting as much as into his graphic practice. He accumulates them, collides them, lets them contradict one another. There is in his approach a restlessness in the act of adding images to images. Yet the artist frees himself from documentary weight, embracing the necessity of a model. He does not forget, however, to "set images in circulation, to make them transit, to disguise them, distort them, (...) and to play, with full knowledge and pleasure, in, with, against the powers of the image."1 The pretext photograph — the one that has nothing to say and yet tells stories.
I have little doubt that, behind these visual collisions, the artist has ventured at times into Photopolkie — that "popmodern country" as Xavier Domino defines it.2 Clément Dupont draws from it a living material, adding to it the matter of the studio and of chance. He layers, pastes, embraces visual citations — the mark-making of a Cy Twombly, or the reprise of Benday dots, an identifiable homage to Roy Lichtenstein's beloved halftone screen, magnified by Sigmar Polke, inseparable from Robert Rauschenberg. <blank>
More recently — and this is cause for celebration — Clément Dupont is allowing himself to reveal his gestures. Until now, he was committed to the invisibility of his touch. Oil paint in all it embraces of the photographic and, I dare add, the digital. In his latest canvases, the artist ricochets. Wiping his brush becomes an act of art, no longer merely a studio gesture. He now does so on the canvas that will serve as support for the next painting. A continuity and a dissonance are thus set in motion within the perception of palettes. And this accumulation — this collection of raw, colored matter — comes forward and structures. The palette becomes a subject in its own right, equal to all other motifs. The artist speaks of a pangram3, in that the work brings together everything that constitutes painting. The palette, then, with its pure colors and its unplanned mixtures; but also the tools that crease, staple, draw, or blur; the supports that absorb or resist; the accidental traces — splatters, smudges, fingerprints — right through to the adhesives that mask, delimit, fill. Everything is now part of the work. Also admitted is this gesture — still too nascent to know today whether it heralds what follows — when the artist turns the canvas over, paints on the verso, then re-frames it. Both sides will be shown. There is much in Clément Dupont's work, and yet, in parallel, astonishingly, the canvases increasingly welcome space, emptiness.
<about:blank> Void Breath Silence
I distinguish in his new paintings a faithful balance between the comforting motifs of his medium, the belated arrival of the self-portrait — with all the complexity that subject carries — and genre scenes, such as the recent series featuring dogs. I also see how tension drives him. Clément Dupont grants himself constant learning, notably during his stay in Japan, which reawakened drawing and materiality through the ancestral tradition of woodblock printing. The artist questions the multiplicity between art and craft, rigor and love of technique, the will to do well and digital interaction, glitch. He claims all these appetites within the contemporaneity of his age and his century. <blank>
Calm, patience, slowness, attention — I unfurl this almost hypnotic attitude in his way of working, of savoring the layers, pictorial and chromatic. I place "the background" back at the center here, or how the artist — in a historical continuity of his medium — spends many hours before finalizing his grounds. Discreetly, the dominant color comes to neutralize the others. The indefinable, monotone beige of the recent canvases nonetheless carries within it shades of green, pink, yellow, orange, and gold (what a family!). And it is only through the use of glazing and contemplative attention that the eye perceives, then admits, the plurality of hues, the kick of the sometimes biting colors of the underlayers — this millefeuille within the artist's work.
Clément Dupont integrates images into his painting as much as into his graphic practice. He accumulates them, collides them, lets them contradict one another. There is in his approach a restlessness in the act of adding images to images. Yet the artist frees himself from documentary weight, embracing the necessity of a model. He does not forget, however, to "set images in circulation, to make them transit, to disguise them, distort them, (...) and to play, with full knowledge and pleasure, in, with, against the powers of the image."1 The pretext photograph — the one that has nothing to say and yet tells stories.
I have little doubt that, behind these visual collisions, the artist has ventured at times into Photopolkie — that "popmodern country" as Xavier Domino defines it.2 Clément Dupont draws from it a living material, adding to it the matter of the studio and of chance. He layers, pastes, embraces visual citations — the mark-making of a Cy Twombly, or the reprise of Benday dots, an identifiable homage to Roy Lichtenstein's beloved halftone screen, magnified by Sigmar Polke, inseparable from Robert Rauschenberg. <blank>
More recently — and this is cause for celebration — Clément Dupont is allowing himself to reveal his gestures. Until now, he was committed to the invisibility of his touch. Oil paint in all it embraces of the photographic and, I dare add, the digital. In his latest canvases, the artist ricochets. Wiping his brush becomes an act of art, no longer merely a studio gesture. He now does so on the canvas that will serve as support for the next painting. A continuity and a dissonance are thus set in motion within the perception of palettes. And this accumulation — this collection of raw, colored matter — comes forward and structures. The palette becomes a subject in its own right, equal to all other motifs. The artist speaks of a pangram3, in that the work brings together everything that constitutes painting. The palette, then, with its pure colors and its unplanned mixtures; but also the tools that crease, staple, draw, or blur; the supports that absorb or resist; the accidental traces — splatters, smudges, fingerprints — right through to the adhesives that mask, delimit, fill. Everything is now part of the work. Also admitted is this gesture — still too nascent to know today whether it heralds what follows — when the artist turns the canvas over, paints on the verso, then re-frames it. Both sides will be shown. There is much in Clément Dupont's work, and yet, in parallel, astonishingly, the canvases increasingly welcome space, emptiness.
Emptiness as potentiality. It has long been known in art that the void is not absence, but invitation — a place where everything may come to pass. I am pleased to return here to Japan with Clément Dupont, and to invoke the culture of Ma (間). A principle that structures the perception of the world by balancing presence and absence, fullness and void, sound and silence. This term names the interval, the space or emptiness between two elements, as much as the distance that exists naturally between objects, or the pause in time between two or more phenomena.4
I look then at Clément Dupont's canvases, and alongside the pangram, I think of the iroha-uta, that poem which uses every syllable of the Japanese syllabary: the white of the ground is never truly silent — it remains charged with all that has been and all that is yet to come. Perhaps that is why certain canvases, like certain poems, hold us for so long. They do not merely show; they distill. They are at once tool, gesture, and what remains — a syllable, a stroke, a word, a touch of color, an absence, a continuous breath between the void and the full.
I look at the works of Clément Dupont.
I fall silent.
Four minutes thirty-three.5
— Émilie Flory
Manosque, April 2026
1. Michel Foucault, La Peinture photogénique, 1975. Text written for the exhibition catalog Le désir est partout by Gérard Fromanger, published by the Parisian gallery Jeanne Bucher.
2. Xavier Domino, Le photographique chez Polke, Éditions Le point du jour, 2007.
3. A pangram is a short sentence containing all the letters of the alphabet.
4. See the definition of “Ma” in the dictionary of classical Japanese, cited in Arata Isozaki, La notion d’espace-temps au Japon, Musée des Arts décoratifs, 1978.
5. A smile and an amused nod to John Cage’s musical work 4’33’’, composed in 1952.