Oliver!

Tim Daish meets Oliver Clegg, London's rising artist du jour.

Oliver Clegg, 27, is sitting upstairs in the Crown and Goose pub in North London talking me through his website.

The pub is a Camden relic with faded charm and shabby beauty: paint peeling off the walls, old iron chandeliers and vintage wood, and the appearance a lap-top creation on the lived-in table seems apt and reflective of the very nature of the artist's work.

Clegg asks us to consider the way we used to do things - in the good old days - and what it is that we have lost both physically and spiritually in the era of advanced modern technology.

"It's kind of a reaction to the i-pod generation... so many things are instant... and I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing, I mean, I'm showing you this stuff on my Apple, which I love, it's just I think it's worth looking at. It's an interesting tension...we used to spend longer making things, they weren't uniform and homogenized..."

His paintings include subjects such as a smashed gramophone record player, and discarded children's toys from the early 1900s, whilst integral to many canvases are old exercise and reading books from the 1930s.

When he paints, he paints in oils. Some artists want to start with a blank canvas, whereas Clegg searches out objects that have already had a life as something else: old drawing boards from art schools, still personalized with the doodles and scrawls from generations of students. The objects are interesting in themselves and have a history even before Clegg starts to work with them.

Something that pervades his work is the sense that he's not being ironic, which is refreshing for a 21st century artist in London.

The unresolved tensions of old/new, light/dark and the various contradictions inherent in the advancement of consumerism reflect Clegg's own unknowing about what these 'advances' in production and experience mean.

"I'm not saying here's the answer to the question, I'm saying here's a load of questions. Maybe that's what makes them interesting images to look at."

"We're losing the physical experience involved in doing things... like with reading," he explains, picking up a book to demonstrate.

"When you read a book, you interact with an object, you change you body position, your eyes focus differently on the pages as they turn... which is completely different to the way that you interact with text on a computer screen, tapping at a keyboard. They reckon that you don't remember stuff as well if you read it on a screen as when you read from a book... there's no muscle memory getting involved in the experience."

The decline of the book aptly encapsulates Clegg's concerns. On one piece, from his 2005 collection of book etchings, an academic text book is open on the page titled "The Growth of Understanding in the Young Child", and blurring the text on the opposite page is the pencil etching of a child's toy. The etching seems to simultaneously undermine, over-ride and back-up the academic statement, and yet the toy appears in a discarded state, conjuring up all kinds of sentiments regarding the writer, the reader, the toy, the owner of the toy, and the artist himself.

It is as if this one image is a window into an entire complexity of personal relationships, growth and decay, ownership and loss, childhood and adulthood.

"Part of the new exhibition is these wooden sculptures in wooden frames. I wanted it in a basement, and I wanted it in Soho, and in a Georgian House, and the sponsors ( Krug champagne ) were like, 'ok'. And the after party will be at the Groucho club." Nice.

These "wooden sculptures" are quasi-religious carvings within illuminated frames that each have a Latin phrase at the base - an ancient language (and one we don't learn too often in schools these days…) - such as est quaedem flere voluptas "there is a certain pleasure in weeping"; another contradiction.

All of this isn't bad for an artist who has only been working at it full-time for a year and a half, having graduated from an MA City & Guilds course in 2005. He took art seriously at school, "but I didn't think I was going to make a career of it". He studied History of Art and Italian at Bristol, and the Italian part of the degree allowed him to go to Italy for a year, where he entered a private studio in Florence to study painting.

He has since exhibited at the Royal Academy and is recognised as one of London's bright young things.

Following the exhibition in Soho Clegg will be exhibiting at Art Basel in Switzerland, ( 13th - 17th June ) one of the biggest art fairs in the world. Catch him now in the UK and, if you've got a few grand to spare... invest early!

Where: 68 Dean Street, London

When: Until Sunday 20th May

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