HOUR OF THE WOLF

Philip Clairmont 21st September- 10th October

p i e r r e p e e t e r s g a l l e r i e s

48 SHORTLAND ST, VERO CENTRE, AUCKLAND CBD +64 9 3774832 WWW.PIERREPEETERSGALLERY.COM

PHILIP CLAIRMONT HOUR OF THE WOLF

21ST SEPTEMBER- 9TH OCTOBER

(As a child) I knew I wanted to be a painter or a bullfighter

(and) nothing else Philip Clairmont

In Philip Clairmont’s personal notebooks he writes about Hour of the Wolf, Ingmar Bergman’s

1968 brilliant and difficult Swedish surrealist-psychological horror-drama.

Clairmont was very taken with this film, and we see the transformative state seen in the film

where the actor’s faces sometimes morph into animal heads, referenced and somewhat revered

in Clairmont’s paintings around this time, and in this exhibition, such as

Country Carnivore Carnival, (p.2)

The film mostly takes place between midnight and dawn, the hour, which Bergman calls the

‘Hour of the Wolf’ and explains:

“It is the hour when most people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are more

real. It is the hour when the sleepless are haunted by their deepest fear, when ghosts and

demons are most powerful. The Hour of the Wolf is also the hour when most children are born.”

Claire Ulenberg

1. Country Carnivore Carnival , Oil on jute, 1400 x 940 mm

In the film, Hour of the Wolf, an artist has a breakdown while confronting his repressed desires.

At night the artist is haunted by insomnia, paranoia and strange dreams.

This echoes the inner turmoil that Clairmont suffered, which contributed to his short life. His

expressionist painterly display of angst, energy, and virility – he was a master of creating and

suggesting forms with paint.

The film director required a creative act of imagination from his audience, a sort of suspension

of disbelief. Which is what Clairmont also demands from us, the active viewing audience.

Martin Edmond, author of the biography, The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont, (1999) said when

interviewed by Hamish Keith and asked about Clairmont’s practice and expressionist style,

“I always thought that what Phil was trying to do was give you a portal, a door. Doors of per-

ception. You were meant to go into a Clairmont painting. You were meant to go through it...”

Claire Ulenberg

2. Stairway with Light, oil and collage on jute, 1500 x 800 mm, c 1976

A man of deep contradictions; Philip Clairmont had one of the most rock’n’roll reputations in the

art world of the 1970s and yet, he was modest, shy, highly articulate and profoundly thoughtful.

Clairmont’s paintings are wild, frenetic, jangling and electric. The intensity of his perceptions - of

the inanimate deeply familiar objects of his home life - manifest as powerful, hallucinatory visions.

Stairway with Light features one of his classic themes of the swinging pendulum; his hot light bulb,

ever present during his nocturnal painting sessions. Bizarre viewpoints and dancing, curving and

zig-zagging forms whip up a powerful maelstrom dominated by electric yellows, greens, reds and

emphatic black lines. Fragments of Brueghel reproductions adorn the surface, testimony to his avid

consumption of European art history.

Ultimately Clairmont’s works defy glib conclusions, a fact which is part of their strength and staying

power.

3. Inocence Threatened (sic) Oil on two jute canvas sections, affixed to a stretched canvas, 1450 x 1395 mm, 1970

Clairmont’s paintings are challenging and do not give themselves up easily.

Powerful and phantamasgoric, enigmatic and eventful, they suggest terrifying forces which are

personal and universal in connotation. One of three artists who dubbed themselves the Militant

Artists; for Clairmont, transgression was the truest way to live.

The year before Inocence Threatened [sic] was painted, Clairmont’s first child, daughter Melissa,

was born. The late 1960s and 1970s were a time when New Zealander’s no longer felt remote

and safe. The potential calamity resulting from the Cold War affected all of humanity. Nuclear

war was a horrifying thought. Clairmont’s diptych speaks of bringing an innocent child into an

uncertain and cruel world.

In The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont, Martin Edmond writes of both the original working

drawing with notes and final painting:

The left panel features half a head, seen front on: eye, ear, part of the mouth. The larger right

panel completes the self-portrait, but this side of the face is obscured and overlaid by other

faces. Central to the composition is the head of a baby, itself within a great white bird’s head,

recalling the Jungian symbol of the soul.

[T]he baby’s head is an image of vulnerability, while the incandescent white is meant to

suggest heat from a nuclear inferno. The head shape is in fact made up of a composite of body

parts, mostly teeth, ears and eyes...The corner of a white rectangle, like one of the shapes from

Colin McCahon’s Gate paintings of the late 1950s and early 1960s, themselves about nuclear war,

pushes into the picture from the right....

The painting belonged to the artist’s collection and can be seen hanging over his bed, a decade

after its making, in the documentary, ‘Profiles: Philip Clairmont, NZ ON SCREEN, 1981, directed

by Bruce Morrisson.

4. Self Portrait, (Keri Keri No. 10)Oil on board300 x 300 mm, 1975

The Neo- Expressionist, Philip Clairmont was immensely infleunced by his domestic

surroundings which becomes a motif in his paintings, he often expressed his emotions and

frustration through the depiction of everyday objects.

The subjects found in Clairmont’s paintings take on anthroporphic qualities and are

hallucinatory in appearance, these characteristics of his oeuvre have been attributed to his interest

in the psychedelic underground art of the 1960s.

Clairmont was taught by Rudolf Gopas at the Canterbury School of Fine Arts. He graduated from

here in 1970 and he received a Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council grant in 1973. By 1977 he had

moved to Auckland and was painting full time.

Clairmont experimented with the combination of vibrant and earthy colours to create paintings

which often lacked a focal point therefeore his work is often embedded with notions of movement

and power allowing his compositions to be injected with energy.

Aviva van der Heever

Helter SkelterHelter Skelter

5. Helter Skelter acrylic on two jute canvas sections+collage on board, 215 x 95 cm, C.1972 - 1974

Helter-Skelter is undated, it belongs stylistically to Philip Clairmont’s important early period in Christ-

church, after he left art school in 1970. He spent this time at home looking after his baby daughter

Melissa. Clairmont painted the domestic environment around him in various old houses, with

elaborate fireplaces, staircases and sash windows capturing passive items suchs as old couches,

staircases, wooden chairs and tables.

All angles and lines in Helter-Skelter point to the centre, a wooden chair, set in a chaotic, messy,

charged room upon a rumpled, patterned rug – one of a number of chair paintings made in the

early 1970s.

In 1970 Clairmont wrote about his interest in such domestic subject matter: “A room contains within

its four walls residue of human thoughts, actions and emotions, a visual catalyst of memories and

associations, past and present.” He believed that commonplace / inanimate objects could be

transformed by the painting process. He once wrote: “I need an image, a starting point for my paint-

ings... I like to start with a subject – whether it’s a chair, a fireplace, a staircase – and then transform

it.” He said: “I found the whole expressionist thing came closest to the core of the matter. If I paint

a chair, my reaction to it and how I feel about it becomes the thing. So, in a way, each painting is a

self-portrait.”

Michael Dunn has written about Helter-Skelter and sites Clairmont’s many visual sources including

“American psychedelic art, as seen on vinyl record covers, with heightened colour effects involving

haloing of objects with light, spatial disruption and a surrealist freedom of association and

metamorphosis of forms.”

In Helter-Skelter, little eyes stare out at us, a disambodied head and face stares at us with glassy

eyes, and there are feet nailed to the ground with a knife. As always with Clairmont, there are

hidden and hinted at meanings in this painting. The title Helter Skelter is integrated into the

painting, it means disorder and haste, qualities that are powerfully embodied in the intuitive way

Clairmont created this painting, and the feeling it gives of process rather than resolution.

6. Self Portrait in Butterfly Mirror, oil on hessian mounted to board, 1720 x 945mm, 1978

Painted four years after the artist’s 1974 exhibition mirrors at the Bett Duncan gallery in Wellington,

Self Portrait in Butterfly Mirror (1978) continues the artist’s life-long exploration into the liberating

power of painting and its unique ability to explore one’s sub-conscious.

The central motif in the Bett Duncan exhibition was, as it is here, the butterfly mirror and the residues

of daily life in all its seeming mundanity which it encapsulates. Clairmont’s unique ability as a painter is

to help reveal the rich tapestries of our lives through the objects which we choose to surround

ourselves with. Some of the artist’s best known paintings have managed to make the utterly

forgettable totally unforgettable. In these works the artist has succeeded like no other in this country

in making the inanimate animate, coaching to life couches, wash-basin’s, fire grates, wardrobes and

beds and in doing so anthropomorphizing them, somehow bringing them to life, making them at

once threatening, enticing, erotic and charged.

The composition and structure of Self Portrait in Butterfly Mirror is a typical one for Clairmont in which

a central form of a vase of flowers gives way to a parade of disjunctive and amorphous colours, forms

and gestures. as our eye pans the surface trying to make sense of the fragmented composition and

searching out the artist – more so than usual, it is a ‘self-portrait’ after 28 all – boundaries between

foreground and background become indistinct. an eye appears here only to disappear, a light bulb

flickers on only to be immediately turned off, and the back of a chair marches its way forth before im-

mediately receding. As Clairmont himself once remarked of the domestic subjects he painted,

Self Portrait in Butterfly Mirror seems to have a life of its own, an essence and energy beyond the

mere paint and canvas with which it is conceived.

Ben Plumbly

7. Black Cruxifiction, Ltd edition screenprint 50/90, 780 x 510 mm, 1981

p i e r r e p e e t e r s g a l l e r i e s

48 SHORTLAND ST, VERO CENTRE, AUCKLAND CBD +64 9 3774832 WWW.PIERREPEETERSGALLERY.COM

PHILIP CLAIRMONT PRICELIST HOUR OF THE WOLF

21ST SEPTEMBER- 10TH OCTOBER

1. Country Carnivore Carnival POA

2. Stairway with Light POA

3. Inocence Threatened (sic) POA

4. Self Portrait POA

5. Helter Skelter POA

6. Self Portrait in Butterfly Mirror POA

7. Black Cruxifiction $3,500