Indepth Arts News:
"Clemente"
1999-10-08 until 2000-01-09
Guggenheim
New York, NY,
USA United States of America
In 1980, at the 39th Venice Biennale, Francesco Clemente emerged
before an international audience and won critical acclaim for his rich
and complex visual imagery. His use of the figure and return to
traditional, artisanal materials broke with the dematerialization of the
art object that was prevalent in the art of the late 1960s and 1970s,
and he went on to take a central role in the international revival of
Expressionism in the 1980s. Clemente moves fluidly across temporal
and cultural boundaries, from the ancient Mediterranean to India and
New York City. He draws omnivorously from diverse sources: Italian
Renaissance illuminated manuscripts and frescoes, Indian miniature
painting, Romanticism, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art. Alluding
to the kaleidoscopic range and elusive nature of this pictorial
universe, critic Edit deAk described Clemente as a chameleon in a
state of grace.
Born in Naples in 1952, Clemente moved to Rome in 1970 to study
architecture. The '70s in Italy were marked by frequent student
protests, massive labor strikes, outbreaks of urban terrorism, and
sweeping social battles. Against the backdrop of these deep social,
political, and economic upheavals, Clemente began to explore the
medium of drawing. Influenced by the work of Joseph Beuys, Alighiero
Boetti, Luigi Ontani, and Cy Twombly, he accumulated a reservoir of
images that he would transform and reinvent throughout his career.
Seeking alternative modes of aesthetic experience, Clemente made
several extended trips to India between 1973 and 1978. During
these visits, he continued to produce notational drawings and began
to collaborate with Indian artisans on works such as Two Painters
(1980) India's heterogeneous culture profoundly affected Clemente's
artistic and intellectual sensibility, impressing upon him a model for
the stylistic fragmentation that would characterize his oeuvre. In
India, the artist found the freedom to work simultaneously with
different subject matter and mediums, such as drawing, watercolor,
fresco, oil painting, sculpture, and book illustration.
By 1978, Clemente's work commanded the attention of many artists
and critics. The Italian art critic Achille Bonito Oliva grouped Clemente
with other Italian figurative artists of his generation--notably Sandro
Chia, Enzo Cucchi, Nicola de Maria, and Mimmo Paladino--under the
banner of the Transavanguardia. Bonito Oliva defined the artists of
the Transavanguardia as cultural nomads who roamed freely
throughout history to weave together personal myth and public
imagery. In the early 1980s, this uniquely Italian movement was
assimilated into the international phenomenon known as
Neo-Expressionism, or New Image Painting, and Clemente acquired
the label of Neo-Expressionist with the exhibition of large-scale,
gestural paintings such as Perseverance (1982) and The Fourteen
Stations (1981-82), a cycle of twelve large canvases that reinterpret
Christ's Passion with a dramatic layering of images reminiscent of
Willem de Kooning's art. Despite its figurative qualities, however,
Clemente's visual grammar exceeds the rhetoric of
Neo-Expressionism, and his complex art has always resisted
categorization.
Drawn to New York's wild cultural heterogeneity, Clemente and his
family moved permanently to the city in 1981. He quickly integrated
himself into a community of painters, graffiti artists, composers,
musicians, filmmakers, poets, and critics, and collaborated with
several of its members. He illuminated poems by Allen Ginsberg and
created a group of paintings with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy
Warhol. It was also around this time that a quality of lightness
appeared in his work, exemplified by the whimsical line renderings
and simple, airy composition of the series of watercolor portraits
begun in 1982, such as Morton Feldman, Keith Haring, and Robert
Mapplethorpe (ca. 1982-87).
The retrospective Clemente, organized by Deputy Director and Chief
Curator Lisa Dennison, unites more than two hundred works in
various mediums dating from the early '70s through the present.
Extending the antihierarchical logic and open-ended spirit of his art,
the exhibition is organized according to eight themes chosen by the
artist. More poetic than categorical, these themes open several paths
into Clemente's labyrinthine oeuvre and synthesize for the viewer a
uniquely personal narrative of his work. I examines how Clemente's
portraits and self-portraits constitute the self as a permeable entity
whose borders shift in encounters with the Other. In the watercolor
Alba & Francesco (1982), for example, the boundaries between the
artist and his wife disappear as the two literally blend into one
another. The works in Unborn evoke the paradoxical character of
Clemente's art, suspended between the material and the immaterial,
word and image, East and West, and--as in The Dark in Me (1988),
whose terra-cotta and gold coloration recalls Etruscan art--past and
present. Books, Palimpsests, Collaborations examines Clemente's
involvement with the literary community, especially his book
collaborations with poets. Inspired by 12th- and 13th-century books
that explicate the spiritual importance of animals, Bestiary reveals
the artist's conviction in the equal importance of all orders of
existence, from the animal to the mystical. Conversion to Her links
the polymorphous sexuality in Clemente's imagery to the idea of
metamorphosis. Rooms opens spaces for meditation and features
various frescoes as well as The Indigo Room (1983-84) and The
Fourteen Stations. In Amulets and Prayers, signs, numbers, and
references to the elements and the senses that recur throughout
Clemente's work are treated as interwoven systems imbued with
personal significance. The sculptures Sun, Moon, Mercury, and Saturn
(1992), for example, link the alchemical power of metals to celestial
bodies. Directly beneath Frank Lloyd Wright's domed skylight, Sky
employs the metaphor of the cosmos to suggest how Clemente's
ideas and images combine to form a unique aesthetic constellation.
--Melanie Mariņo, Curatorial Assistant
Related Links:
| |
|