ART CITIES:N.York-Francesco Clemente

Francesco Clemente’s nomadism inflects many aspects of his practice: The artist divides his time between New York, New Mexico, and India, drawing inspiration from the cultural histories of these places as well as from his native Italy. Likewise, he has traversed movements over the course of his four-decade career, having been linked to the Italian Transavanguardia group that emerged in the late 1970s as well as New York’s concurrent neo-expressionism.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Lévy Gorvy Gallery Archive

Francesco Clemente’s exhibition “Watercolors” surveys three decades of work in the medium and features many works that have never before been exhibited. Throughout his career, Clemente has experimented widely with various mediums, from ink drawings to oil and tempera painting, as well as site-specific installations including tapestries and sculptural objects. Suited to his famously nomadic lifestyle, watercolor took a prominent role early in the artist’s career. In the 1970s, he began traveling extensively, particularly throughout India, where he immersed himself in the country’s manifold aesthetic traditions. Watercolors, pastels, and handmade paper, preferably from Pondicherry, became the key tools, light and portable, for capturing his experiences. Clemente emphasizes the ability of watercolor to bleed into paper and generate veils of semi-transparent color, employing it to emphasize the creative stimulus he has found on the Indian subcontinent. His art often alludes to Hindu mythology, encompassing an approach to form and identity that foregrounds a representation of fluidity. In his recent series Gold on Gold (2016) and Shadow (2017), Clemente integrated Indian miniature paintings, a practice he adopted in the 1980s when he created Francesco Clemente Pinxit (1981), now in the collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. While Clemente’s ingenious use of watercolor was initially inspired by his trips to India, his innovative exchanges in New York and elsewhere also nurtured its development. Following in the footsteps of William Blake (whose work he and Allen Ginsberg referenced in their collaborations in 1983 and 1984), Clemente takes up watercolors to realize images that mix the personal and spiritual, recognizable figures and abstract forms. He has developed a powerful vocabulary of images, figures, and symbols, many of which reappear throughout his oeuvre, as seen in “Symmetry” (1991) and “Chain” (1996), two watercolors from his “Book of the Sea” series. At the core of Clemente’s artistic project is the need to confront the suggestiveness of reality—the fantasies, visions, and stories human beings have historically fostered into myths. Even explicit subject matter feeds into this” This tendency is evident in such recent watercolors as “A Story Well Told” (2013) and “Notturno Indiano” (2019), series that were inspired by the myth of Apollo and Daphne and a novella by Antonio Tabucchi, respectively. In these works, Clemente’s aqueous treatment induces a sense of tranquility that allows the viewer to navigate taboo subjects within a broader fascination with the material life of watercolor as a medium. The artist’s fascination with the emotive power of color and form is also central to “Beauty Without Witness” Clemente’s latest body of works in watercolor, made in this time of self-isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic. The richly colored seascapes of this series feature shells and toys washed ashore, evoking fantastic worlds and nostalgia for childhood memories.

Info: Curator: Bill Katz, Lévy Gorvy Gallery, 909 Madison Avenue, New York, Duration: 17/8-1/10/20, Days & Hours: Book an appointment here, www.levygorvy.com