The Limits of Language: Clark Medley’s Passion and Unspeakable
By Milagros Bello, PhD
Clark Medley’s practice gravitates around the paradox of language—its capacity to inscribe meaning and simultaneously to collapse into opacity, excess, and silence. In both Passion and Unspeakable, Medley turns writing into a terrain of tension, where the boundaries between legibility and illegibility, discourse and affect, dissolve into unstable surfaces of visual intensity.
In Passion, the canvas becomes a palimpsest of textual layers; in the background, the artist has transcribed around 100 designs from his Tattoo profession, with figures of multiple evocations and referenced affective stories; in the second plane, the hidden word passion is in Medley’s black typographies in arabesque contortions, forming an architectural scaffold that evokes rationality and cultural inscription. This structure is disrupted by the eruption of a glittering red rose in metal flakes traced with energetic strokes that exceed the boundaries of text. The rose, a classical emblem of love and desire, appears not only as a symbol to be decoded but as a force that unsettles the legible order of the work. The glitter amplifies its presence into the realm of seduction and excess, making the gesture itself the site of passion. What emerges is an “illegible script,” a visual language that articulates desire without ever becoming fully communicable. Medley positions passion as a semiotic disturbance: something felt, intuited, embodied, but never fully captured by words.
Unspeakable, by contrast, shifts from the two-dimensional surface to an expanded installation. Suspended cylindrical tubes, each containing rolled canvases inside painted with typographies and contrasting chromes, punctuate the air as vertical vectors of color and energy. His calligraphy, as a coded language of secrecy, encapsulates inscriptions of pure signification stripped of referent. They do not carry words but vibrations—signals that cannot be spoken yet demand reception. By displacing language into three-dimensional space, Medley emphasizes its performative and spatial dimensions: language is no longer something read, but something encountered, inhabited, and physically experienced.
The title Unspeakable resonates here as more than a metaphor. It is a confrontation with the limits of articulation, a meditation on what exceeds verbal discourse—trauma, secrecy, eros, and the ineffable. The viewer is invited to inhabit a suspended space where language is both everywhere and nowhere, hovering between form and dissolution.
The Passion painting and the Unspeakable installation articulate Medley’s ongoing inquiry into the borders of expression. Both works foreground language on the verge of breaking into gesture, ornament, or silence. Medley’s work situates the viewer in a liminal space where the sayable confronts the unsayable, where the inscriptions implode, and writing no longer communicates but vibrates.
Medley’s art becomes a poetics of the unutterable, where silence burns into form, and absence speaks.
At Mia Curatorial Projects /[email protected]/ +17863570568 @miacuratorial @milagrosbellocurator
