Clément Mancini

"The paintings of Clement Mancini are fragments of matter. The reading is not in the sign to be seen - the given form - but in the manifestation of textures. Rough, dense, untied, smoothed, coloured... The material releases its entrails, from its fragility to its coarseness, as the painter's gesture confronts the distended raw cotton with his tool. By working the plaster with a trowel - by spreading it, stretching it, scraping it - streaks, gaps and various traces are born, which others would qualify as imperfections, that Clément Mancini deliberately seeks to reveal. In this sense, Clément Mancini's work can only be apprehended by physically confronting it, by closely contemplating the protrusions, irregularities and thicknesses; by feeling the dryness, the scratches and the scratches; by sharpening one's gaze in order to detect among the wrinkles of the material-language our own stories."

Anne-Laure Peressin, art critic

"For a long time, Clément Mancini has answered the call of the wall. So much so that the echo is clear between his past graffiti and his current paintings, also painted instinctively, in a lively gesture, almost vandal. The hand, nimble, traces without sketch signs deprived of sense on black or cream backgrounds, neutral flat surfaces full of traces. Freed from everything, these illegible writings represent nothing: they are forms in themselves, similar to the direct expressions of the American abstract artists - Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Clyfford Still. In turn, Mancini goes into action and colours vast open fields in a reduced palette, ranging from brown to green and rust to pink. Azure blue lines, apparent veins suddenly electrify the whole, which otherwise oscillates between darkness and pale fire. The surface, seen from afar, appears smooth. Up close, the original ghosts emerge, mistakes that Mancini does not deny. Better still, they give him a frame: shots are improvised in sections isolated by strips of tape and then erased, covered up, erased again, in full or in part. These random cuts in the layers of acrylic create angles, a sense of depth, a perspective effect. Chance and superposition already guided his first plaster jets and his rust frictions, other material games with the air of parietal prints. These ones, even more stripped down, bear the same bite of time."

Virginie Huet, art critic