Francesco Clemente (born Naples 1952) began his rise to prominence in this country with two exhibitions at the Royal Academy — the famous New Spirit in Painting of 1981, when figuration was officially relaunched on London (though for some it had never gone away); and Italian Art in the 20th Century eight years later. A third RA venture was a Clemente solo show in 1991, a touring exhibition entitled Three Worlds, memorable as much for its plethora of exciting and witty images (many in pastel or watercolour), as for the beautiful girls thronging the private view. Clemente has long been a fashion icon; in him popular art and high art meet and mingle. His world is a nexus of opposites: the historical and contemporary, abstract and narrative, masculine and feminine, human and animal; and, most importantly, spiritual and material.
This is the first Clemente exhibition in England for seven years, and it looks pretty impressive. Given the title of the show, with its echoes of desert island meditation, these 14 paintings may be taken as companions of solitude. This enjoyable suite of pictures was specially conceived for the elegant new Blain|Southern space on the corner of Hanover Square and Hanover Street, and it has all the hyper-sophistication required of a modern Robinson Crusoe, shipwrecked in one of our great contemporary cities, perhaps London, New York or Tokyo, where it is possible to be more lonely than on the most remote atoll.
Since the 1970s, Clemente has divided his time between New York and Varanasi in India, a cultural oscillation he feeds directly into his art. The imagery is richly varied, with echoes of surrealism in general, and Magritte in particular, mingling with the Buddhist mandala and what look like mythical scenes from an alternative history of the West. His roots are in the fresco tradition of the Italian Renaissance, but he is also deeply influenced by historical Indian imagery and (more surprisingly) by the glories of William Blake. In his work East collides with West, but Kipling warned that never the twain shall meet, and despite the fluency and dexterity with which imagery is manipulated, there’s an unresolved awkwardness here, a commitment deficit. Does Clemente strive too hard to be a visionary but end up a cut-price surrealist? Perhaps his onward journey will take him closer to his goal.
The two Magritte-inflected images are of doves. In ‘The Sky on the Wall’, a blue-grey frontal silhouette of a dove in flight is filled with sea-shell or flint-shaped clouds, set against an old and spotty brick wall. In the other image, ‘The Dove of War’, the rock-like clouds form the background in a troubled pink sky, and the bird’s profile outline is filled with overlapping fighter planes. Both are intriguing images, but derive much of their impact from being cover versions of Magritte, specifically referring to his hollow dove paintings ‘The Kiss’ of 1951 and ‘The Great Family’ of 1963. To move on to Clemente’s other work, there’s a rather amazing large painting of workers trudging along with backpacks and falling uniformly, like lemmings, off the edge of the world. It’s a striking image of conformity in painterly pink, blue and fawn, but echoes of other paintings abound, not least of Sargent’s great epic ‘Gassed’ in the Imperial War Museum.
There are also two rather good paintings of pillars. One, entitled ‘The Triumph of the Sunflower’, depicts the flower growing through the centre of one of the columns, having cracked it in half, presented on a lovely eau-de-Nil ground. (Nature triumphing over culture.) The other, ‘Gandhara Dream’, shows a quartet of prettily pastel columns, each surmounted by a standing golden egg, and each supported by a human skull.
Other paintings look like prayer mats, with heaps of bodies in sexual congress, sleep or death. Magical things are evidently going on — note the masks and ominous scissors. There’s something of the archetypal, folkloric imagery of Ken Kiff here, but more distanced because more foreign and so less familiar. The rounded hills in ‘La Femme Fontaine’, breasts or buttocks, again recall Kiff, but the squeeze of interlocked bodies is less home-grown, and the beautiful silver white sky-writing is pure Abstract Expressionist decoration.
A rather sullen girl, her hand covering (or drawing attention to) her pudenda like Titian’s Venus, looks askance at a dark blue horse, which is showering her with golden coins (like Zeus and Danae) from pizzle and muzzle, a double benison of essence. This is ‘Indigo’s Child’, a potent image. I also liked ‘The Ark’, in which the zoo floating on an ocean of Sanskrit is also a temple and houses two giraffes, a monkey and tortoise, a bison, a hog, an elephant and a goat. More alchemical variations on Peter Shaffer’s Equus in ‘Chasing the Star’: a female figure within a male horse helps the animal to give birth to a man, her hand on a sacred vial gleaming centrally.
Note the mica-glitter in some passages of these paintings, which is presumably from the size with which the thinly painted canvases are prepared, rather than a sprinkling of seasonal glitter. Clemente does however use a wide variety of less-than-usual materials including milk paint, verdigris and silver pigment, as well as oil sticks and lithographic ink. However, I gather that his linen supports are actually raw, rather than treated, therefore the glitter is really mica. Perhaps it symbolises the trace of the imagination?
Modernism saw the apotheosis of the fragment (‘these fragments have I shored against my ruins’, said Eliot), so what we need now is a new unity. Clemente offers us a chic dialogue of opposites, that suggestive juxtaposition of extremes which promises so much but delivers very little without the true genius of interpretation being present. I wonder if we have that interpretative genius here, or whether what we are seeing is simply a set of elegant confrontations: gorgeous façades to hide an inner emptiness. And the fact that I am posing this question suggests just that lack. His friend and long-time supporter Norman Rosenthal calls Clemente ‘a cultural carnivore of the highest order’, but to ingest is not necessarily to understand. And understanding, along with independent thought, is what is really in short supply.
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