Death is certain - Nothing dies (2)

The digital graphics tryptich Death is certain - Nothing dies formed the centrepiece to the small retrospective of Christopher Clack's work at Modern Religious Art which ended today.

Juxtapositions are Clack’s stock-in-trade. Tyrannasaurus rex and crucifix, cemetery and prism, head formed by the moon, pieta with astronaut - these are just some of the disparate images brought together in his work and this show. Such juxtapositions position us at a point of paradox, a liminal place where there are more questions than answers, as in Death is certain - Nothing dies.

Clack has written that:

"In much contemporary art practice we are not given answers, we are given images and word games. Contemporary art attempts to move us away from the everyday, to break down our ideas and preconceptions ... artists in someway expect us to be able to live with their inexplicable contents, to live with the inexplicable. 'What does it mean' is not the appropriate question in relation to contemporary art, but how does it alter my perceptions, does it open things up."

Similarly, in a interview with Living South, Clack said: 

"People ask what I am trying to express, but I can't say I set out to express anything. In the process of working you find things, and show what you find.

"The process of making art can seem a messy business, chaotic at times; what the rules are is never very clear, and when we find rules we then break them as the situation calls, yet out of this comes an order, a sense of meaning. Many artists will say their best work seems is if it made itself."

Contact info@modernreligiousart.com for details or 020 86131944 / 07942099500.

Christopher Clack

Christopher Clack says, "I have been making images for as long as I can remember and for as long as I can remember there has always been an element of religious imagery or content in the work I have produced. Why this should be, I do not really know.

What I do know is that the connection between religion and art is for me a profound one, one that I think has implications for the way we think about religion as well as art."

He trained as a painter, studied at Camberwell School of Art and then at the Royal College of Art. His main medium was oil paint, but he also loved etching and making sculptures. One very important aspect of all his work was the physical, tactile nature of whatever he made, so it seems very strange to him now that he works almost completely on computer. His images are produced using scanners, cameras, and software such as Photoshop and paint programs like Coral painter. The product of all this is then turned into an object by printing it out using large format printers, using the best quality materials he can lay his hands on.

It’s now become a sort of challenge for him to bring into this medium a sense of the physicality of things that is generally felt to be lost in the digital production.