The work of Clément Savin focuses on human figures in landscapes, a motif anchored in a long pictorial tradition, from Renaissance iconography to Picasso’s Bacchanalian scenes and Willem De Kooning’s Women series. In his paintings, the figure functions less as a narrative subject than as an emotional catalyst: a means for the painter to sustain a feeling long enough for the painting to unfold and develop. As for the landscape, it allows for a reflection of the internal state of the figure. 

In recent years, Savin has increasingly turned to figures that occupy a middle ground between the material world and the realm of the divine: Dionysos, the Minstrel, the Alchemist or Merlin the wizard, for instance. Within the context of our materialist, technology-driven world marked by acceleration and alienation, these archetypal figures embody a tension between continuity and rupture: they stand simultaneously as heirs to millennia-old spiritual traditions and as fractured entities, compelled to radically reinvent themselves in order to retain their meaning.

In part, these archetypes enable Savin to enact an indirect form of self-portraiture: seeking to bring about new forms of reality, the painter lives this tension between heritage and innovation at the core of his practice. In turn, the colours of Savin’s paintings express the same ambivalence, as they tread the line between earthly ochres, muted tones and vivid saturations. But through these personas, Savin also quietly articulates the psychological unrest of our contemporary times, in the face of war and human exploitation. Set in landscapes bursting with energy, they question our relationship to our environment, reminding us that we are creators of our own reality.

Similarly, in his Walker series, Savin addresses the loneliness inherent in forging one’s own path, as well as the depths of the human spirit. Inspired by Arthur Rimbaud’s poetic masterpiece “The Drunken Boat”, and representing a lone traveller moving through fractured landscapes, these paintings once more break the barriers between subject, figure and environment. Upon contemplating them, it progressively becomes unclear whether these abstract spaces constitute an external reality that can be walked through, or internal images of the traveller's psyche. 

Savin is deeply inspired by philosophy, in particular by Platonism and Hegelian dialectics. To some degree, this tradition visually seeps into his subjects — in the form of mythological, demiurgic characters, or suns made of concentric circles evoking Plotinus’s sequential hypostases. But, perhaps more importantly, these influences also entail a teleological relationship to artmaking for the painter: Savin is always aiming to push the formal boundaries of painting far beyond the commonly accepted divide between abstraction and figuration. In this sense, his visual practice is both informed by centuries of artistic innovation and yet radically contemporary. This approach sometimes gives birth to drastic variations in style, as every painting follows its own formal necessity, but the underlying desire remains the same.