Clive

Knights

Clive Knights commands control of the viewer's attention, creating intentional works set upon minimal canvases of black or white. Every detail of each composition is expertly crafted, yet his organic rips provide a quintessential humanity to the works. Harnessing the powers of recontextualization, Knights creates imaginative works that invite the viewer into a world of his own creation, showing only what he wants to be seen.

With collage I want to remind the audience that a work of art demands their imaginative participation in the elucidation of its meaning and that ‘seeing something as something else’ is the grounding of the possibility of common understanding, that is, seeing likeness in things that at first appear to differ. This metaphoric movement, that only works with participation, is the foundation of language, and thus, I believe, the basis of the very possibility of human community: to recognize commonality in difference without eradicating the continuity of that difference. Collage intrinsically engages this dynamic, perpetually poised between synthesis and divergence, between an idea of unity and its exquisite impossibility.  

Clive Knights

In making a collage I extemporize from the beginning until the gathered paper fragments start to incite a theme or narrative which might then loosely direct the selection of further fragments to complete the work. I prefer to build a concrete array or field with papers of different surface qualities, textures, shapes and colours, free of easily recognizable imagery. If an image is instantly recognizable it can distract from the whole and weaken the metaphoric capacity of the work as it will tend to dominate. So, images have to be carefully dissected to offer partial recognition, preferably mis-recognition, as this will open up avenues towards rejuvenated interpretations.

Clive Knights

Clive Knights was born in 1960 in England. He is currently based in Portland, Oregon.