« The true profession of a man is to find a way to himself » Herman Hesse As Americans prepare to vote in a political and social configuration similar to that experienced by Europeans during the ‘migration crisis’ of 2015, Clément Denis' exhibition “Beyond the lines, where borders collapse” looks at the theme of displacement through a series of paintings addressing the different states of exile as seen by the artist: waiting, flight and struggle. The artist had already touched on this theme between 2016 and 2018, when he and his partner welcomed young refugees into their Paris flat. Their stories disturbed him, particularly that of a painter from Burundi who had survived the war: ‘Clovis told me about his escape when he was only 5 or 6 years old: the bodies on the road that had to be stepped over, the only water available on the way, red with the blood of the dead bodies piled up in the lake... He had kept a stammer. That image of the red water terrified me...’. He has produced a whole series from this: Cartographie de l'exode, in which he mixes the faces of exiles from the First and Second World Wars with the faces of contemporary displaced persons. Here he attempts to paint a psychoanalytical portrait of the wandering human being. Then in 2018, during his Masters of Fine Arts degree at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris, and while his partner was working on a report for a European institution on detention centres for foreign unaccompanied children in Europe, he presented five works inspired by the subject, in which he mixed pictorial language and cartographic language to symbolise the mental patterns and physical space allocated to those we no longer want to see or whose existence we simply don't know. Clément Denis wanted to reopen it at a later date, but this series of works was never presented in a gallery or museum, and the artist only agreed to sell some of the paintings on two occasions: the first was for a Maltese art collector working for the European Commission and committed to these issues, and the second was for a Greek doctor whose husband, a well-known photographer, had produced a series of reportage photographs in various Greek refugee camps. Her husband had recently died and the series reminded her of his work. For his second solo show at Nicolas Auvray Gallery, Clément Denis decided to reopen this series, including the main work from his MFA diploma exhibition, ‘La Foule’, as well as ‘Femmes silhouettes’ and ‘Biface’. To guide viewers through this solo exhibition, Clément Denis has created a body of work in which every choice of composition and every medium used has a profound meaning as to the stage his ‘human crowds’ are at. The first state addressed in this exhibition - waiting - is expressed through figures that are sometimes ghostly, sometimes as if diluted in the landscape. Clément Denis drew on drawings from the last thirty years of Rodin's life, saying: ‘Rodin uses fluid, expressive lines in his drawings, capturing intense emotions, even if the sketches sometimes seem unfinished. It was in 2011, during an exhibition at the Rodin Museum in Meudon, France near Paris, that I discovered his late-life drawings. His mastery of composition and the organisation of forms on paper inspired me as I worked to incorporate elements of movement and dynamism into these works, which certainly represent figures in waiting, but whose psychological state is ‘active’, in search of a path.’ The most mysterious works, ‘Biface’ and ‘Femmes silhouettes’, are paintings in which the artist uses her fingers, squeegees and brushes to apply layers of paint, only to erase and scrape them away, revealing her female bodies through a fog - the fog of our prejudices. The artist scratches the surface to reveal the true nature of these human beings, beyond the stereotypes conveyed by the society of the spectacle as theorised by a French thinker much loved by the artist, Guy Debord. The exhibition continues with state number 2: displacement. To understand the second state of exile, Clément drew inspiration from paleo-Christian frescoes from the 1st and 2nd centuries. Often altered by time, they symbolise the fragility of memory and identity. This deterioration evokes the struggle of refugees, whose stories and struggles can be so easily forgotten and erased. By showing partially erased works, Denis emphasises that human narratives, like frescoes, are vulnerable, and through religious iconography he establishes a dialogue with universal themes such as suffering, hope, unity and redemption. This allows the viewer to connect the struggles of contemporary exiles with fundamental human experiences, ‘Man being after all a nomad at base, a homo sapiens sapiens…’ We find the cartographic language dear to the painter, and which he has already used in his series on the exiles of the First and Second World Wars, ‘Cartographie de l'exode’, in his works symbolising ‘the struggle’: variations in size, colour and thickness in his outline lines in order to create a hierarchy in the pictorial information, tools such as pencil, ink pens, felt pens, watercolour and all this on drawing paper. The artist remains first and foremost a painter, and his acrylic brushstrokes can be seen at every outline of the image. And behind the multitude of human beings dancing on the paper, we can make out the duality between a hand-to-hand struggle between men, and the symbiosis that can arise from these encounters. The characters in ‘Becoming the map’ face those in ‘Many more will meet’, or perhaps not? Perhaps the characters are the same, painted and drawn at different times? It's not for nothing that the artist has named one of his works ‘Becoming A Map Of Love’. In homage to the artist Madeleine de Scudéry, who in the 17th century created the first ‘Map Of Love’ (or Map Of Tenderness), representing a symbolic landscape of love relationships in the context of courtly love, with places like ‘The City of Love’ and ‘The Land of Innocence’. Far from a naïve vision, Clément Denis attempts in his own way, through the cartography of human beings in situations of willed or forced displacement, to draw up a psychological profile of our humanity, its wanderings, its forfeits and its great hopes. That's why the artist uses techniques and gestures from contemporary combat sports such as Senegalese wrestling, Brazilian jiu jitsu and grappling in his storyboards. ‘La date du 6 novembre’ depicts the same scene 15 seconds apart, as if painted “on the spot”. This repetition of scenes, like film storyboards, is all the more visible when you look at the pentaptych ‘Repetitions and Solutions’. The first work, ‘Répétitions N°1’, depicts six men engaged in a kind of combat. The work is astonishing and open to multiple interpretations: stuck together, they seem both on the verge of rocking and at the same time firmly supported on their legs. They could be engaged in a kind of English wrestling match, as if in a dance. One of the figures brings his hands close to the other's face, in a gesture similar to those used in Senegalese wrestling. Then, when we move on to the central work, the ‘Solutions N°1’ paint weave this time we see 12 figures in the same positions, like a monolith, against a blue background symbolic of ‘water’. The symbolism of the number 12 and its characters plunged into a debacle can easily evoke the 12 apostles, recalling the evocation of paleo-Christian frescoes or the 12 tribes of Israel, which brings us back to our original identity: that of nomadic peoples. The works are spectacular, painted on art paper from Italian and French mills. The artist loves the delicacy of paper, its apparent fragility. ‘The choice to switch from canvas to paper was a natural one. Paper is alive, it drinks water and swells, then when it dries it tightens up. It's very resistant, contrary to what you might think...’. Just goes to show, you should never trust appearances. In any case, that's what this second New York exhibition by the French painter aims to show.