Clemente, Francesco

Francesco Clemente

Francesco Clemente, who enlivened the New York art scene in the 1980s along with a handful of other image-conscious Italians, including Sandra Chia, is said to be a reclusive artist who guards his privacy, but this richly informative book makes that assertion difficult to believe. Clemente himself has always offered a good deal of autobiography to his viewers, with works that have explored his own visage (and other parts) with relentless interest and introspection. And now comes Francesco Clemente, filled with intimate pictures shot by his friend Luca Babini in Clemente studios from New York to New Mexico to Naples. Packed to bursting, the photographs show Clemente working away, with wife, kids, and dogs in tow. With its pictorial richness--paint-spattered floors, trampled rags, stacked canvases, raw-edged, unstretched paintings stapled to huge walls, encrusted studio shoes, and scores of photographs of works in progress--this book will be devoured by other artists, who will turn the pages in a lather of envy, not necessarily for Clemente's fame and success, but for the huge windows and high ceilings of his various work spaces.

Clemente is a fecund artist, and there are many wonderful shots of his art--whole walls and tables full of it--that make a succinct statement correlating productivity and achievement. Clemente has contributed a kind of prose poem for the first part of the book, in which he discusses being a painter, and there is also a rambling essay by art writer Rene Ricard on artists' studios from ancient Egypt to the Renaissance. But the pictures are the point of this book, and they handsomely reward the reader's attention. They constitute an invitation to spend time--years, in fact--with a painter whose inventiveness, ambition, and style have made him one of the most successful of his time. --Peggy Moorman

This catalogue of recent works by renowned Italian painter Francesco Clemente proves that his oeuvre has only grown richer and more complex over the years. The sumptuous, transcendent works presented here are driven in particular by Clemente's instincts about the use of color - in some he limits himself to warm oranges and greens, creating a soft, sensuous atmosphere that reflects his lifelong love of India and tantrism. In other works here, however - namely the "grisaille self-portraits" - there is an emphasis on black that recalls classic Western painters like Titian and Rembrandt, and points to darker and more intimate areas of the self. It is through this meeting and mixture of the aesthetic languages and prophecies of East and West that Clemente has produced his best work, and the work in this monograph testifies to the pleasures of art that ignores boundaries in its investigation into the psychological and spiritual essence of life.

Francesco Clemente: The Sopranos

Francesco Clemente: Three Worlds

Clemente

This finely wrought, lush, 500-page volume does justice to the wide-ranging oeuvre of one of the most open-minded, ambitious, and productive artists of the late 20th century. The catalog of an exhibition at New York's Guggenheim Museum in the fall of 1999, it contains a wide range of writings, including Robert Creeley's haunting poetry, a thorough chronology, and half a dozen essays, including the introductory "Once You Begin the Journey You Never Return," by the Guggenheim's Lisa Dennison. In accordance with Clemente's paintings and drawings, the book touches on themes from Indian mysticism, prayer, the body's pores and orifices, family bonds, and a number of metaphysical and physical concerns, being and nothingness among them. In the essay "Rooms," Francesco Pellizzi draws a long thread through cave painting, Meister Eckhart's sermons on the soul, Renaissance Rome, and Clemente's wall paintings to arrive at "the transmodern sense of a shifting place of origin; every step, every station, is the first and last in this vortex, a maelstrom animated by an eros that is enveloping and inevitable but also, in the end, joyous...."

Clemente's art, which lays bare his obsessions with sex, self, and spirituality and explores them with a constantly surprising range of intense color and formal invention, stands in bracing, deeply pleasurable opposition to the desiccated, design-bound, theory-driven work that has dominated so much art of the last 25 years. Art historian James Elkins has described making graduate students copy, stroke for stroke, works by Monet and other painters, to give them a feel for "What Painting Is" (as he titled his recent book). Clemente raises the stakes a notch, demonstrating what painting might be, if we were to allow ourselves to be drenched in its myriad possibilities. --Peggy Moorman

Francesco Clemente has, since the 1980s, been a leading artist in the international revival of expressionist figure painting and sculpture. Clemente's subjects--rooted in both the physical and the surreal, spiritual worlds--create a vast body of work that appeals to diverse audiences. Clemente draws upon a pan-historic web of impulses, mediating among the myriad cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, Byzantium, Europe, India and America. Stylistically his work recalls the Italian Renaissance, Indian miniatures, European Romanticism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. Clemente's widespread cultural interests and nomadic lifestyle--New York is his home but he spends part of each year in Italy, India and the New Mexico desert--have deeply affected his art. This lavishly produced catalogue accompanies the first major survey devoted to the painter.

Francesco Clemente Affreschi: Pinturas al Fresco

Francesco Clemente: An exhibition and sale : prints 1981-1985, May 14-June 9, 1985, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Francesco Clemente: Works 1971-1979

The Italian-born painter Francesco Clemente came to prominence in the mid-1970s when intensely subjective yet universal themes filtered into his skewed self-portraiture, witty wordplay and gestural figuration. This volume compiles a decade's worth of works on paper from those early days, many of which were inspired by Italy's political crisis at the time or fellow artists Alighiero Boetti and Luigi Ontani. The Italian artists of the 1970s were working in the context of the "terrorist generation." There was a crisis of capitalism and of Western societal values--both of which informed such major ideas in Clemente's early work as "fragmentation of self" and the "refutation of reason." Suddenly the body became a territory for artistic exploration; it became a border and led to the idea of travel. Here Clemente learned to trust geography over history, and his highly personal symbolism of the time bears proof of an itinerant life spent between homes in Madras (current-day Chennai, India), New York and Rome, with many trips to Dehli, Srinagar and various areas of Afghanistan mixed in.Published on the occasion of Clemente's recent exhibition at New York's Deitch Projects, this deluxe volume highlights the artist's concerns with process and concept--not technical perfection--and his obsession with paper's ephemeral vulnerability. Hints of Clemente's later forays into Surrealism and deep human psychology are also evident, and provide an essential view of the beginning of a masterful career.

In Company: Robert Creeley's Collaborations

Celebrating poet Robert Creeley's pathbreaking role as an artistic collaborator, this illustrated volume adds substantially to the documented history of contemporary multidisciplinary art. For more than forty years, Creeley has worked on collaborative projects with some of the best-known artists of our time, including Georg Baselitz, Francesco Clemente, Jim Dine, R. B. Kitaj, Marisol, and Susan Rothenberg. In Company explores this history with essays, interviews, archival photographs, and images of the books and portfolios created, from Numbers (1968) with Robert Indiana to Edges (1997) with Alex Katz. An accompanying CD-ROM features interactive presentations of the projects.

The publication of In Company coincides with a traveling exhibition organized by the Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University. The exhibition, which opened in Niagara this spring and will travel to the New York Public Library in September, will also appear at the Weatherspoon Art Gallery at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, and Stanford University's Green Library.

Robert Creeley, winner of the 1999 Bollingen Prize and author of more than 60 volumes of poetry, is Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and Humanities at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Francesco Clemente Testa Coda

Francesco Clemente: Three Worlds