The Predators (animals)
Text from the exhibition: "At first sight these
recent works (acrylics and watercolours), seem to mark a break in
Bruce Clarke's art stylistically and subject-wise. Despite this
impression it is nevertheless a coherent continuation of his
reflections on the relations of domination and the impasse to which
they lead us. In this series of paintings the animal is only a
metaphor. The subject, as always with Bruce Clarke, is the human.
Human predation.
For Bruce Clarke a predator in the animal world cannot allow itself
empathy for its prey; it's a matter of survival. His works ask the
question: are we human beings, a
priori different? If so, how far does
this difference go ? Is not one of the characteristics of our
humanity indeed our empathy for others?
But despite this trait of empathy, or even sympathy for his
semblable, Man, homo homini
lupus is also one of the only living
creatures that hunts his own species, far beyond his mere needs for
survival. Human predation is indeed simultaneously financial,
sexual, environmental. It can also be social or ecological
predation; in short, predation in everywhere!
We seem to want to set ourselves apart from the presumed
"natural" order, with our anthropophagite
all-consuming development: no pity, empathy just an
empty word. Growth and power alone count.
Could our rapid rise (just a few hundred thousand years, a blink of
the eye at the scale of the Universe!) be comparable to a
"cancerous growth" on our planet? Has homo sapiens become more or less a
parasite, to the point of consuming his own host, the planet
Earth?
No surfeit in animal predation endangers all species, let alone the
survival of the predatory species itself. Animal predation is cruel
but nevertheless natural and necessary, it finds its balance. In
contrast, human predation has no limit.
It is self-destructive."