References

What does one call a person who calls his art space Math Room, who ponders the nature of knowledge as opposed to belief, who refers to "the gridlock of logic and feeling", who talks in visual tongues rather than honing a singular style, and who believes that "Art is a key to our survival as a species", rather than an individual's attempt at money and status? 

One calls him Frederick Clarke, the young artist, who is at home in derelict buildings in inner city Johannesburg, Ayahuasca ceremonies in Peru, and anywhere else his sharp eye, philosophical instincts and wry sense of humour and beauty take him. Give him a blob of ink and it becomes Inca, give him a brush and he will splash a tidal wave and a tiny boat which are so childlike and yet so cataclysmic that we fear and delight simultaneously. Give him rolls of sodden toilet paper and he will gently mold them into female hips with softly indented vulvae, reminding the most jaded spectator that art and love can meet in wit and affection with the humblest of materials. Give him a dark surface and he will scour furious lines of light from beneath it. Give him a cat's head and a pair of chopsticks and you get the sushi of the absurd.

Clarke is a traveller, both physically, across the world, and a traveller in the arcane sense, that of wanting to understand the journeys that initiates and shamans make in order to plumb the different layers of reality we may venture into if we are brave or free or joyful enough. This sort of journey has received a bad rap over the last few decades. The genuine experiments and searches of the 'sixties have been largely mis-remembered as a decade of self-indulgence and it is regarded as seriously un-cool to tread that route again. Clarke does not focus on being part of the heat-seeking art world, and looks with a comic, and sometimes satirical glance at what makes the planet go round.

To do this he speaks in the language of the comic book, the language of physics, the language of  the accidental mark, as and when the subject requires it. Underpinning this responsive process is drawing of delicacy and precision. Human beings and quasi-monsters loom large in some work, with others tiny and vulnerable within a shared format. The viewer grins in recognition at some oafish blob, and cringes with the midgets. We engage as children do, and Clarke's work shares some of the qualities of the great children's book illustrators. But there is an abiding seriousness to his work. He engages the viewer in order to point to the interwoven profundity of life,  its mysteries, its happiness and sadness, and our profound longing for meaning and experience beyond the mundane curtain we have erected against it.

I am reminded of a character in Paul Scott's Raj Quartet, who observes the "toy-like happy danger of human life on earth". That is Clarke's stamping ground. And his ready access to tenderly drawn or painted passages reminds us that being artistically literate is an act of generosity towards those who search, through his work, for the insights he provides.

- Judith Mason, 2012