The visit was part of one of those tours that interest me most in a city like New York: linking spaces that are not visited merely for consumption, but out of discernment, for inspiration, almost out of a professional and emotional need to keep seeing how others have managed to build their own world. Clic was another stop on that personal map, but not just any stop. In its window displays, in its artworks, in its books, and in its objects, there was a way of editing reality that fully connected with my way of seeing things.
That's precisely what interested me: everything seemed to coexist without friction. Photography wasn't isolated from the furniture or the books. The books didn't function as decorative complements. The objects weren't trying to steal the spotlight from the art. Everything was part of a common scene, a shared language. That's a quality much harder to achieve than it seems, because it requires restraint, taste, and a very clear sensibility about what deserves to be next to what.
Perhaps that's why it caught my attention so much from the beginning. At Clic, that cross between contemporary art, photography, books, and curated objects is not accidental, but part of its DNA, something that the project itself has been consolidating since its inception to become a concept space recognized for that blend of disciplines. And that, for someone like me, who has always felt that the boundaries between gallery, bookstore, studio, and concept store are much more porous than they seem, has enormous value.
I remember walking through the space, photographing very specific details with my phone: corporate solutions, certain artworks, some graphic pieces, books I recognized, compositions that confirmed old intuitions. Also, that very particular sensation of seeing live images by photographers I had followed for years, like Antoine Verglas, whose work is part of that sophisticated, sensual, and editorial imaginary that has always interested me so much. Verglas, moreover, has been linked to the Clic universe, sharing a prior history with Christiane Celle at Calypso St. Barth. More than discovering something completely new, what I felt was the rare pleasure of confirming that years of intuition had real substance.
