It has become increasingly clear to me that the pleasure of painting lies in the subtle interplay between what the picture shows and what is says. – Yves Clerc
Yves Clerc began his career in drawing and photography, before turning to painting and abstraction, followed by figuration. He offers us a poetic vision of the world, where shimmering colors rub shoulders with flat blacks. Yves Clerc’s aim is not to tell, but to show. Transparency and its staging are his favorite themes.
His works often depict portraits of women, their eyes masked and their expression neutral, to let the whole composition express itself. Yves Clerc loves texture and plays with boundaries: he paints long, crumpled draperies that he creates with a juxtaposition of layers of paint, but also of techniques – oil on canvas, acrylic, drawing, painting on photo.
The artist also attaches great importance to resonances between works. He has thus reworked some great paintings in his own way, such as Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring, and collaborates with personalities from other artistic backgrounds, such as Irina Vitjaz (a renowned Moscow stylist) and Leïla Menchar (set designer for Hermès). Yves Clerc mainly exhibits at the Bailly Gallery in Geneva, but his work is also regularly shown worldwide: Paris, Mexico City, Moscow, Geneva, London, Brussels, Lisbon, New York and Miami.