Gilles Clement Gallery presents an exhibition of new work by the French collaborative team of Clement/Kamena. The show centers around a monumental painting: “The Kiss” which has taken as it’s source a very famous photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt the photo journalist for Life Magazine, who on V-J Day, August 1945, was in Times Square capturing images of the celebrations. One image was perfect and it became a symbol for the release and joy of that moment. Called “Kissing The War Goodbye” it portrays a U.S. Navy sailor kissing a stranger, a dental assistant, at the end of WWII.
Now, 75 years later, the collaborative team of Serge Clement and Marina Kamina have brought that image forward to our current world situation. The painting displays that same couple and that same kiss but, in an absence of celebrators, it is in an empty Times Square. At the same time the kiss is shared while wearing the surgical face mask that has become a ubiquitous symbol of a pandemic. The inference is that this is a similar tumultuous moment and that we will celebrate the end of the pandemic, as we did WWII, as a world threat that is finally in the past.

Other paintings in the show explore the mask as a recurring, mysterious element in our culture, as Serge Clement and Marina Kamena suggest some new ingenious ideas.