R. Kelly Clipperton’s I Don’t Want to Set the World On Fire, showing down the street from me at the newly-opened Bohmer Lounge, is printed large - 4 by 3 feet - on thick plexiglass, and mounted a few inches away from the wall, which has the effect of throwing an impression of the image onto the wall behind.  Often, the multiplication caused by this effect - combined with the shifting shadow of the object itself - makes the image appear muddled, but through using a reductive palette, and rendering the background areas in low key black and white, giving it a deliberately artificial yet photorealistic sensibility, the artist’s technique brings the image to life.

The transparent forest green of the curtains takes on the effect of stained glass, becoming luminous, a religious object, and the flesh of the figures becomes uncannily realistic through the three-dimensionality of the shadows and cast light. Two female figures - sumptuously dressed in ball gowns and hats, one clutching an infant - read as Madonna and child with handmaiden, saints whose halos are now reconfigured as hats. These elaborately coiffed beauties, though, seem a long way from Bethlehem, their faces register a mixture of concern and detachment, they are preoccupied with their conversation; meanwhile, the 21st century environment looms behind them in black and white, a view in which the city is catching fire.  

In his artist’s statement, Clipperton speaks of “the notion that no matter what goes wrong, continuity will pull you through,” and here captures that sense of continuity in its most literal manifestation - the birth of a new generation, but there is a strange ambivalence at work - are these figures the heroines of some new mythological tale, survivors of some sort of Children Of Men nightmare scenario, or are they consumed by their own lives, nouveau riche arrivistes who fiddle while the city burns?