Annie Clavel Explores Human History in Vivid Color

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Annie Clavel Explores Human History in Vivid Color by Genie Davis

Human History, Annie Clavel’s lustrous new exhibition opening Saturday June 14th at LAAA Gallery 825, is the story of humanity and the restless and relentless human drive to explore the unknown and overcome adversity. The exhibition takes note of the fact that human beings venture beyond their homelands to search for a better life and sustenence, something that has been true since early man formed tribes all the way up to today’s migrations.

Her visionary approach explores how these global shifts and movements shape and reshape our world over time, transforming it. Examining this impact is a celebration: of the courage necessary to face the unknown and the spirit of hope that moves humanity ever forward. It is a positive and beautiful message that is especially resonant in the current political climate.

According to the artist, “This exhibition is a consideration on migrations over time, on the movement of populations, whether voluntary or forced, and on the dynamics of history.  For a long time, the source of my inspiration has been my interest in cosmology, astronomy, the infinitely small and the infinitely large. However, the events that I paid attention to and that furnished my reflections were not visible in my painting: population movements, effects of natural disasters on humanity, consequences of famines and wars.”

Clavel adds “In my immediate surroundings, I have seen the increase in poverty in the U.S. [which fuels migration]. In addition, I like to think about the different countries from which I come or in which I have lived: my father’s Indochina (Vietnam); my mother’s France, and also  Germany, Tunisia and the United States.”

She notes that “The history of recent decades has also led me to read numerous articles and books on migration. A book deepened my thinking on the history of migrations [was] The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan. The book was described by Vanity Fair magazines as “an exhilarating companion for the journey along the routes which conveyed silk, slaves, ideas, religion, and disease, and around which today may hang the destiny of the world.”

To create her exhibition at Gallery 825, Clavel started on a series of small paintings, beginning with the representation of currents and water in nature, in an abstract way. Then the idea of perpetual migrations inspired me and a whole series of paintings with silhouettes of migrants was born.”

She notes that she wanted to integrate a third dimension to the art for this exhibition by building small sculptures. “This gave me the opportunity to emphasize the permanence of migrations in space and time. I cut long strips from large watercolors on Yupo. I had initially imagined assembling Moebius strips. They have neither front nor back, and you can imagine walking indefinitely on one of them without seeing the end.”

Clavel says that her initial idea needed to evolve, in part because of “the difficulty of gluing the two ends of the strip together without the joint being visible. The sculptures became convolutions of strips springing from a wooden base. To demonstrate the historical connection, I named each sculpture with mythical place names.”

She views this new body of work as both a continuation from and a departure from her past work. “My previous paintings have often expressed movement… Look at the titles of several of them, ‘Rip Current,’  ‘Tsunami,’ and ‘Turbulence.'”

As an artist, Clavel relates that she has always wanted to incorporate human forms into her abstract paintings, and while this is not exactly what she has done in this series, the new work represents a step in her process, one she views as being “neither realistic nor objective,” while expressing her intention that she may introduce the human figure in her next series. Instead, here, she points out “we can see silhouettes, even large groups of human beings. They run to avoid floods, they jump to escape a catastrophe, they are forced to flee without knowing where to go.”

She says that her palette is chosen before she starts painting, and like much of her work, it is based on her own feelings and artistic impulse. “I don’t think about the composition in advance, I just think about how I feel. In this series, I started with blue and green, painting wide open spaces and river currents. I added bird migrations to a few paintings, then began adding migratory flows of human creatures. For the sculptures, I used the same palette as [that in] my paintings.”

Come see the new series of Clavel’s lucious work Human History at Gallery 825 at 825 N La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, running from June 14 to July 11th. The opening reception will be held on the 14th from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m.

Note that Clavel also has work in these two exhibitions:
Summer Salon
juried by Baha H. Danesh
June 7 – July 12, 2025  at Artshare LA in DTLA

and

A Woman Perspective
organized by the Southern California Women’s Caucus for Art (SCWCA)
June 22 – July 19, 2025; opening reception June 22, 1-4 p.m.
Long Beach Creative Center, 2221 East Broadway, Long Beach, CA 90803

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by artist

Order and Chaos: Rich and Rewarding Work at Orange County Center for Contemporary Art

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Order and Chaos, at Orange County Center of Contemporary art through this Saturday, is a supremely lovely show, visually rich and full of life; infused with the wonders of science and the intensity of the artistic process.

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Artist and curator Annie Clavel notes that the show is a continuation of her past work, Parallel Universes, and is built around the scientific concept of “chaos theory.”

“I have always been impressed by how a simple equation in mathematics could burst into an incredible never ending complexity, like fractals,” Clavel says. 

The French-born artist, now based in Long Beach, explains that chaotic systems, such as fractals, can appear smooth and ordered. Fractals themselves are a never ending pattern, created by a simply, repeating process in a perpetual feedback loop, and as such are pictures of chaos.

As fascinating as this is – particularly when viewers recognize that Clavel is a scientist and mathematician as well as an artist – the exhibition works purely on its visual beauty, with a surreal and swirling palette.

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Above, Clavel’s watercolor “Oasis,” is part flower, part imploded planet; mysterious and fecund with a glowing life force.

Below,  Osuna’s work in oil, “Conundrum,” seems to draw viewers inside darker unfolding, a velvety night, an imploded star.

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Clavel and Miguel Osuna started working on their show a year ago, sharing information and ideas about its theme.

“We knew each other work quite well. His paintings are monochromatic and huge. My paintings are colorful and most of them are small. It’s this diversity that looked like a perfect fit,” Clavel relates.

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Above, Clavel’s series of small paintings are intimate, perfectly wrought abstract works.

“The display is not chaotic, but the diversity goes into the direction of chaos. I would like that the viewer feels harmony and disproportion, balance and imbalance, order and chaos,” Clavel says.

Osuna’s oil on aluminum works, below, seem to have absorbed both light and color within their surface, works whose form are as yet inchoate, but seem in the process of definition.

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Osuna views his work as intuitive. An architect, his desire is to create order from chaos in his art.

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Clavel’s “Lava 3” is a fiery, volcanic rush; contrasting with work such as this is Osuna’s “Rule of Thumb,” below, is an equally intense work, but far different in style and approach – this is lava that has cooled and formed a more cohesive pattern.

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“His paintings in this show are conversing with mine, even if they are very different. Many viewers have expressed that Miguel’s paintings were order and mine were chaos. It is not: both of us have experienced in different ways order being chaos or chaos being order,” Clavel attests. “I hope that the viewer can feel the cohesion of our experimentations.”

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Above, Clavel’s “Cosmology 3” appears to be in perpetual motion. Thick, lush colors evoke a world viewers could almost touch. Below, her “Thunder” throbs with the power of a raging sea.

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Over the course of their preparations for the show, Osuna and Clavel both shared photos of their works and their concept on Instagram, #OrderAndChaosShow

Osuna says that his latest explorations on surface, reflexion and glare allow him to create his own mini-universe.  “I can represent both my understanding and my questioning of the universe at large. Ultimately, my hope is that the viewer shares this microcosm with me, searching for the same ideas, solutions, and emotions that connect us.” This view drew Clavel’s interest at a time in which she was still working on her previous series.

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Above, Clavel’s “Playing Dice.”

“I thought that we could do something about ‘Universes,’ however I wanted to change the direction of my work,” she attests. “At that time I was reading a few books written by mathematicians, such as What we Cannot Know by Marcus du Sautoy and Does God Play Dice? by Ian Stewart. Those books inspired me to think about the way the universe behaves, and that’s how the idea of a show about Order and Chaos came to my mind.” 

Clavel invited Osuna to participate in her show as a guest artist.

The result is a show that shimmers with light, form, color, and mystery – the very essence of chaotic impulses that are the basis for creativity. If the world formed from chaos and became ordered, then the world of art, with all its passion and chaos, creates order in the form of channeled artistic impulse.

A conversation with artists Annie Clavel and Miguel Osuna will take place Sept. 23rd, 2017 – 2 to 4 pm, moderated by Jill Moniz.

The gallery is located at 117 N. Sycamore in Santa Ana.

  • Genie Davis; photos courtesy of the artists

 

Annie Clavel: Universes of Art

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Clavell Connecting UniversesAnnie Clavel is an artist who inhabits Parallel Universes. The name of a new series of her paintings, the title is also an apt description of her philosophy of life and her art.

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Clavel is a mathematician as well as a painter, and her work reveals both a precise, mathematical balance and a preference for abstraction as she depicts a world driven by quantum mechanics and minute particles.

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Her mixed media on canvas paintings combine a variety of nuanced colors, refined brush strokes, and alternating textures. According to the artist, this approach represents “the variety of parallel universes with particles, photons, and waves.” Clavel sees one particle as being in two locations at the same time in the quantum universe, an idea which led her to create this series. In a number of paintings, creepers serve as links between each universe, and square, opaque windows reveal only blank faces between worlds.

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In Three Xs in a Red Soup, the clearly defined yellow x’s seem to emerge like living beings from a miasma of swirls and tiny, almost floral dots. Smaller, less defined red x’s appear to soar along a clear, pale yellow path, aiming for some place beyond the red world. Green shapes that look amphibian in nature cruise through what could be openings into a different space. The viewer feels almost pulled into this painting as if by the power of some centrifugal force.

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Cool whites and blues dominate Photons in the Blue, where a blue square to the center right of the piece pulls the eye. It’s the aesthetic heart of the painting, with small white and yellow shapes inside that could be figures looking out at another world rushing by. While vertical lines predominate throughout the rest of the painting, there is also what could be a Munch-like visage in white traveling through the upper left of the canvas.

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And in Connecting Universes, the gold and yellow dominant swirls are clearly delineated by curves and brush strokes of red. Two separate red sections appear about to intertwine, amoeba like – and while these rudimentary life forms are certainly brought to mind, their uncoiling touch points also evoke an entirely different image, that of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, that Sistine Chapel image of God and Adam touching gone abstract.

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In Matter & Antimatter, Clavel’s art takes on an almost purely floral quality. Like purple iris, colorful blooms erupt on either side of a vast, white rift. These shapes are fluid, in motion. Much of Clavel’s works in this series depict an unknowable movement.

 

So what do these universes, these particles, their shifting and flow, mean? The viewer is left to explore what these implosions of color and form shape within his or her own mind, but the overall effect when studying Clavel’s work is to enter exquisite, imaginative, and completely foreign territory. The artist was born in Toulouse, France and lived in France, Germany, and Tunisia before moving to Southern California in 2006. In one way, the works may re-imagine the artist’s immigration from France to the U.S.; in another they are creating a mix of multiple planets, multiple horizons. A hundred sunsets swirl on the head of a pin and flow outward onto Clavel’s canvasses.

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The joy in Clavel’s work is its careful interlacing of color and form, a collision of shapes, an almost three dimensional pull that requires the viewer to do what the artist describes herself as achieving – taking “a step into the unknown.”

Clavel began this journey when she was studying mathematics, visually imagining the concepts she studied in colorful forms. She began by painting representational works in water color and acrylic. Her current abstract work is based on exploring colors, shapes, light, and movement, and how each of these elements form relationships with each other. “I let my instinct and intuition guide my work to capture the magic of the moment,” she says.

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Seeking to express what she feels about the world around her, and her own existence, Clavel in some respects shapes not only parallel universes between worlds, particles, and space, but the parallels that exist inside every person, between dark and light, happy and sad, past and present. If we can exist in spacial terms on a variety of planes, then, perhaps we also exist on different planes of emotion and intent.

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“I tend to create works that express what I’m feeling about the world and my existence, about mathematics and life, abstraction and representation,” Clavel says.

Clavel has painted for over 25 years. Recent exhibition have included the group show Chaos Theory 2 at OCCCA in Santa Ana, Bugs, Fishes & Birds at the El Dorado Nature Center in Long Beach, and juried shows at the Palos Verdes Art Center, Tang Gallery in Bisbee, Ariz., and at the AES Power Plant in Redondo Beach.

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“Life is a series of steps that you decide or that you put up with,” Clavel says. Through her Parallel Universes series, those steps may lead both the artist and the viewer into vast and unknown realms, whose magnificence unfolds with an unerring grace on canvas.

  • Genie Davis; Photos: Annie Clavel