Out of Body Experience, Financial Times: The Business
Francesco Clemente’s work draws on mysticism, beat poetry, Catholicism and Warhol to reach deep into the human soul.
On my way to interview the artist Francesco Clemente in downtown Manhattan, the taxi passes a huge billboard attached to a shabby building: "An eye for an eye/Makes the whole world blind” its street-style slogan neatly encapsulating this artist's reoccupation. For Clemente is a painter who advocates harmony in all its forms - aesthetic, spiritual and worldly. "Painting is like the last great oral tradition in the west. You really have to be inducted by others," he says.
His latest exhibition — 14 large- scale (4ft x 4ft) watercolours from an ongoing series called "The Book of the Sea" — is at the Gagosian Gallery in London, where, until July 27, the artist will present his sensual, delicate images painted in the French West Indies last December and January this year.
Clemente opens the door to his workplace, a large studio on Broadway, with huge windows and wooden floors. He is tanned, with an intense blue-eyed gaze, a New York art world icon at the height of his powers, dressed in a dapper grey suit, which he later tells me was made by his father's tailor in Naples. Large ruby and gold earrings dangle precariously from his lobes, and he wears a gold ring on his little finger— the overall effect is a quirky combination of classical and outrageous. I tell him about the billboard to break the ice, and he says, "You could substitute 'I' for the word 'eye' in the slogan, and it would still be right.” In his seminal Guggenheim retrospective in 1999, there was a whole section called “I”, the starting point of his journey an artist: “;I’ is the self-portrait. which Francesco Clemente returns to again and again," wrote Lisa Dennison, chief curator of the Guggenheim. in the show's catalogue. "The ‘Eye’, the instrument of the artist’s vision. is one of the body's holes that separate inside from outside and through which the self becomes porous to the world."
There is no better description of Clemente's artistic process, which absorbs and fuses. creating work with a liquid. transitional. fragile look. He is best known for his overtly erotic images: orifices, excretions, male and female figures merging into one. His take on modern-day neuroses — sexuality. intimacy, psychological anguish — is unique; strangely comforting rather than titillating the viewer. This is perhaps because the work is underpinned by the artist’s profound spirituality, his reverence of various religions without committing himself openly to one. Although considered a figurative painter by some, his most compelling work is more abstract, sensual, dreamlike, dealing with his own meditation on life and death, body and mind, word and image, form and formlessness, east and west.
Clemente is a painter apart. His work does well in the art market but that is not the point. The process of making it is, and working out the mystery of life along the way: "l embrace this kind of thinking, which is inclusive, about contemplation. You have very practical choices, to accept and to watch, instead of rejecting and acting upon something. That's why I am a painter, because I want to watch, I don't want to act," he says. His continuing strength lies in being a wanderer of the world, who for the past 30 years has opened our eyes to the treasures he finds along the way. In this he is completely in tune with current cultural preoccupations. “He is footloose in time, culture, and metaphor," writer Edit deAk comments. Clemente is not just a prolific painter, but a printmaker and sculptor who is a master at working in almost every artistic medium imaginable, such oils, charcoal, pen and ink, papier-mâché, pastels, watercolour. He collaborates with poets. publishers, filmmakers and artisans, most particularly from India and the US, the two countries other than Italy he considers home. In conversation, he praises the talent of Joseph Beuys and Cy Twombly; quotes people and influences as diverse as the beat writers, the Indian sage Krishnamurti, whose lectures he attended at the Theosophical Society in Madras, his close friend, the radical poet Allen Ginsberg and Jyotindra Jain, director of the Crafts Museum in Delhi,
"Wherever he goes, he harmonises the different elements,” says book publisher and long-time collaborator Raynond Foye, who started Hanuman Books, a poetry publishing house , with Clemente.
For this latest show, Clemente went to the Caribbean. “The climate there is humid, which allows me to make watercolours. It is an extremely unusual skill, you don 't see watercolours this large, because in a drier climate you can't work fast enough to control such a large surface," he says. The human body features prominently in these pictures, as it does in his entire work.
In "'Sky and Water 2001-02", three pale figures float in space, cutting with scissors their only visible means of support, a bruised red mouth-like form; in "Inside", a female figure lies asleep, with her hand between her legs, while above her float a series of open boxes: “Drawers, pockets, purses, they are the funny dark places," he comments. "All my work belongs to these ancient rooms, which are found somewhere in some unknown country…all my work has always had this weathered look. It never looks new, it looks as if it has been through time already.”
His studio a faintly exotic, lived-in quality. inhabited by someone who has also been "through time", or through several lifetimes since his arrival in the US from Italy in 1981. There are treasure chests from India, personal mementoes, photographs pinned on walls, half-finished portraits propped up on easels, and pots and pots of paint, beautifully laid out on the floor in abundant quantity and colour.
"l am not a believer in painting; I am a disbeliever in everything else," Clemente says, in spite of his work in other media and in spite of the more recent fashion of conceptual art, which uses media such as photography and video.
For all his laid-back manner, Clemente has produced a prodigious amount of work. A father of four, he gives the impression of being at peace with himself. Born a Catholic and influenced by Hinduism, he has spent years studying other religions and mystical traditions. He just passed his 50th birthday, and comments: "The more your future shrinks, the easier it is to live in the present. Anxieties tend to go away you grow older."
When he was young. his chief anxiety was being smothered with affection by his mother Bianca, who lost several children before and after Francesco’s birth in 1952 in Naples. His family are Neapolitan aristocrats, his father Lorenzo a marquess and a judge, and he grew up in the Palazzo Calabritto. The two still speak every day, “I could do no wrong," Clemente says, "I was incredibly spoilt.”
Clemente's wide Alba. They met in Rome in 1974 and she has been his muse ever and companion ever since. Family lifeis "my place of refuge", he says.
By the time he was 10. he had seen most of the principal museums in Europe, including the Prado, where Velazquez's paintings made a lasting impression on him. He went to high school, where TV executive Guido Barendson was a classmate who remembers that "Francesco was the most talented dancer and he was quite successful with girls." By the time Clemente turned 19. he'd had an epiphany — helped along by LSD — to become a painter.
His restless and creative spirit clashed with the political climate of the day. Clemente describes Italy in the 1970s as a “nightmare for my generation”. Disenchanted with his country's ideological rigidity, he started travelling extensively in the east, encouraged by his friend Alighiero Boetti, a leading figure in Arte Povera, which dominated the Italian art scene in the 60s and 70s. His subsequent long visits to India between 1973 and 1978 transformed his world view: “I was attracted to India because it was not third world, it another world.”
Back in Italy. his name was linked with a group called "Transavanguardia” (which included Sandro Chia, Enzo Cucchi and Nicola de Maria),. the Italian branch of neo-expressionism, launched at the Venice Biennale in 1980.
This was a significant moment in art, heralding a return to figurative painting after the strict orthodoxy of minimalism. Clemente moved permanently to New York shortly afterwards and within a short time his career rocketed. It was the early 80s and New York had a particularly vibrant club scene that mixed art. music. and fashion. "Club people wanted artists that gave them class and credibility, and artists wanted to know about youth," says writer Vincent Katz. Clemente became the first European example of that curious phenomenon. the artist as star. With his ravishing Italian wife Alba in tow, no downtown gallery opening or party was complete without them. Alba. a former actress, has been his muse and companion since they first met in Rome in 1974. The Clementes are widely admired for their steady family life, "my place of refuge", as Francesco calls it.
In New York. the Clementes quickly integrated into the city's creative group of writers, poets and artists, including the likes of Julian Schnabel, David Salle and Eric Fischl, all of whom are still firmly established in the city’s artistic pantheon. Clemente did portraits of his new friends, collaborated with Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiaton a group of paintings. and illustrated poetry written by Ginsberg and other beat poets such Robert Creeley and Gregory Corso. He also supplied the oeuvre of Ethan Hawke's painter in Mexican director Alfonso’s 1998 film Great Expectations. Cuaron says he would not have made the film without Clemente. “He only wanted to read the book, not the screenplay, and he almost had an actor's approach embodying the painter’s character,” Cuaron says.
Clemente is as generous with other artists as his peers were with him when he first came to New York. "Francesco has embraced me ever since I came to this city”, says Cuaron. "There is a sweetness about him. and emotional honesty.”
His portraits. begun in the mid 90s, search for a personal truth behind the glamorous facades. The portrait commissions he is currently working on are done in one-day sittings (women five hours, men six), with unvarying format (women's heads on the left of the canvas, men’s heads on the right) and uniform size (4ft x 8ft).
Sitting for him can be a daunting experience, as artist Sam McEwen discovered as a 21 -year-old in the mid 1980s. "He was very focused, very serious," she says. "At one point I started giggling. out of sheer nervousness, and he looked up and said. “You are not grown up yet,” I was rather disappointed in myself, but now I think how wonderful it is that this portrait of me exists."