Sin­gled out by the British press as a ’ris­ing star’ of the London con­tem­po­rary arts scene, Oliver Clegg (b. 1980) has gained a rep­u­ta­tion as a multi-faceted artist whose metic­u­lously exe­cuted works hover between two and three-dimen­sional dis­cip­lines. A mas­terful draugh­ts­man and skilled painter, Clegg is a purist when it comes to working with nat­u­ral light and obses­sive about the qual­ity of his mate­r­i­als (whether he be paint­ing, draw­ing, etch­ing, wood carv­ing or exe­cut­ing an embroi­dery). Para­doxi­cally Clegg is one of the most con­ceptu­ally minded young artists working today, playing with lan­guage, narra­tive and mem­ory and draw­ing from symbol­ism and surre­al­ism in his practice.

Play is a motif that runs through­out Clegg’s work, exempli­fied by his paint­ings of dis­carded toys, exe­cuted on found draw­ing boards. The objects speak of pri­vate nos­tal­gias but evoke commonly held expe­r­i­ences of the moment when the child ’gives up’ a treasured blan­ket or toy. Though it is the object that dis­ap­pears, far more is often lost. Freud’s essay ’Cre­ative Writ­ers and the Daydream’ – where he states that though the fantasy world of child­hood is lost to grown ups, it can be kept alive by writ­ers and artists in their work –, is of key importance to Clegg, remind­ing him that it is pos­si­ble to remain ’open’.

If Clegg is cap­ti­vated by play, he is also drawn by the pos­si­bil­i­ties of lit­er­a­ture, poetry and lan­guage. While working towards a show at the Freud Museum in London in 2008, Clegg dis­cov­ered the poems and plays of Heinrich Heine. It was Heine who wrote in 1821: ’Where they burn books, so too, will they in the end burn human beings’. Clegg is sensi­tive to the sig­nif­icance of ordinary objects, transformed in the hands of writer or artist. This act of recycling began when Clegg was still at art school. He col­lected old draw­ing boards, prizing them for their scratch­ings and doo­dles. Clegg likes the fact these come with their own unique history that relates to some­body else’s life. By working with these artefacts, Clegg allows the viewer to wan­der between narra­tives and worlds, unit­ing extant ref­er­ences with new images, or cre­at­ing entirely new ones, recall­ing Duchamp: ’it is the onlook­ers who make the pic­tures’.

Clegg recently lost his Father. The two were close and the artist believes this event and turn­ing 30, have forced him to confront life’s fragility and brevity. Playing as he likes to with words in differ­ent tongues, Clegg found him­self return­ing time and again to: ’berceuse’, (the French for lullaby), as the gen­e­sis for a new body of work. The onomatopoeic qual­ity of the word is sooth­ing, mim­ick­ing the sound of a par­ent coaxing their child into dream­land. Dreams are sig­nif­icant to the artist as a means for cre­at­ing a space that seems half way between the real and the surreal and indeed the surre­al­ist notion of ’the harmony of dis­harmo­nious ele­ments’ is one the artist stands by.

An emo­tive object such as a diary or well-thumbed book, a school desk, blan­ket box, chess-set or even floor boards from a de-con­se­crated church- acquires a noble qual­ity in Clegg’s hands. His careful­ness, born out in patient han­dling and workman­ship, conveys his awe for the past and sense of respon­si­bil­ity. The ques­tion of what the pre­sent owes to the past, and the ulti­mate future that awaits us all is famil­iar through­out Baroque paint­ing and indeed, the ele­ments one asso­ciates with this era: van­itas, chiaroscuro and a dramatic sense of the­atre, with death always ’wait­ing in the wings’ also find a common­al­ity in Clegg’s work. Life – a see-saw that tips between tragedy and com­edy, runs a vivid line through the artist’s work some­times taking the form of a bold out­line, an etched groove or a del­icate thread: a force that connects past to pre­sent and the surreal to the real.

Jane Neal