Clément Davout, Sous le ciel, sous le bleu: Ketabi Bourdet - 22, passage Dauphine, 75006 Paris

Ketabi Bourdet is pleased to present the first solo exhibition dedicated to Clément Davout. Born in Flers, France in 1993, he studied at the Beaux Arts of Caen/Cherbourg and practiced in Brussels before relocating to Paris where he currently lives and works. 

Sous le ciel, sous le bleu marks Clément Davout’s first opportunity to simultaneously present his drawings and paintings in a poetic dialogue with the glass-canopied architecture of the gallery. From midnight blues to the soft warmth of a gradation of oranges, several color palettes emerge which harbor, in a mise en abyme of the composition, a space circumscribed to paintings of plants. These recent works originated in the large greenhouses of the Jardin des Plantes, where Davout took a series of photographs, per his usual creative process. However, following their capture, his relationship to the images finds recourse in the introduction of digital algorithms, which are at the heart of his practice and technique. 

At the heart of Davout’s desire to paint – to consign material, memory, and the sensation of shadows to canvas – is a foundational act similarly found in the myth of Butade’s daughter, documented by Pliny the Elder, which records nothing less than the birth of this medium. Plants, leaves, palms, branches and other arboreal elements comprise a repertoire of organic forms that, when backlit, bloom and print their gracious, forlorn and atemporal silhouettes onto his works. 

And so Clément Davout paints the photographic renderings of plants to which he applies a primary layer of color before submitting them to Instagram filters. The final image appears to progressively emerge on the surface of multiple layers of paint within the same chromatic spectrum, evocative of the magical beauty of photographic cyanotypes. In both cases, light is at once the issue and subject, and is expressed here in the vaporous and gradient color palettes specific to dusk and dawn. This blurred, faded aesthetic inscribes the artist in a lineage that dates from the Renaissance – notably via the technique of “sfumato” – to the contemporary era with artists like Gerhard Richter, who have made it the vector of truth in their relationship to the world.  

But if shadows have often served to infuse a dramaturgical dimension in the history of art, here they constitute an even greater pictorial pretext. The mute, dreamlike undulations of plants are conducive to the singular fixed frame of the painting, and flirt with abstraction, which Clément Davout considers an inevitable temptation for painters. 

There is indeed an influence and reflection of this order in his works. If the artist, who very quickly eliminated the human figure from his work, spent a lot of time looking at American abstract art, and Color Field painting in particular, it’s more through his distanced and conceptual approach that his relationship to abstraction is expressed. And it is here that algorithms intervene: the proportions and tints chosen to frame the main image correspond to those chosen by Instagram to fill the space between the post and the background of the story that frames it, when the artist uploads his edited shots. This staging of the “reign of the attractive”, this distancing of the painter from his subject, this way of enshrining the image, of abstracting it more and more from its original context, testify to the new and future perspectives and questions concerning its status.