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Of Francesco Clemente Towards the “Apostles”of Francesco Clemente Francesco Pellizzi for Aurora Each consciousness must emigrate within. It is like an algebraic equation where the equation is the And lose its neighbour once. only truth, and the terms may stand for anything. e least Emily Dickinson intrusion of the ego, however, involves a return to the illusion of duality.”2 Making art in America is about Aer each of my short but intense sessions with the artist, I saving one’s soul. was struck by the way he appeared completely emptied out (even Charles Simic 1 more than exhausted): as though something consubstantial to his spirit (and to his body as well ?) had been poured into the pictorial object – image of his “model” – or as though a strange Neurobiologists tell us that the nerve system responsible for the chemical reaction had taken place between the two subjects, extraordinary abilities and subtle eloquence of our hands is adja- generating a new and hitherto inexistent element. And further- cent to the one that governs our facial expressions. It sometimes more one has very strongly the impression, looking at Francesco happens that short circuits occur between these two areas, with Clemente’s portraits (female as well as male), that they are all surprising effects on our sensations and communicative reflexes. in some fashion self-portraits: not because they do not “record” is reminds me of the hours I have spent (on three different the subject portrayed, but because this likeness is fixed by some occasions, though decades apart) less than a metre away from aspect of the portraying subject – and is thus assimilated into the face of Francesco Clemente, while his hand traced my por- the artist himself. is is not a question of style, or of manner: trait on a surface invisible to me. e intensity of his gaze from here the manner is only a vehicle for a transposition of two such a short distance soon created an effect of mimesis, so that subjects, the portrayer and the portrayed, in a form that in the act of “portraying” seemed itself to take on a specular qual- some way contains and represents them both: that is to say ity, and it was as though a new and strange identity was created the form becomes the place of this fusion of the two subjects. between the portrayer and the portrayed, or at any rate a kind of From another point of view we can also say, more radically, iconic interchangeability that the hand of the painter orches- that this mingling takes place through the depersonalising of trated, unbeknownst to me, translating it into the precipitate both subjects. e form – i.e. the art – is the result of an almost of a new, hybrid presence. During these sittings I believed that alchemical process of transfusion (or sublimation) of the two I could see – in action, so to speak – how portrait and self-por- identities. We could also call it a translation, so long as we recog- trait had come into being together, in late medieval Europe and nise that a “portrait” can only be understood as an irreversible at the dawn of Western modernity. I thought also of Van Gogh’s achievement, the achievement of a “third state”, from which it portrait of his good friend the Scottish art dealer Alexander is impossible to “turn back”; Clemente’s portraiture is eminently Reid (1887), where the “object” of the representation and the inter-subjective. Undoubtedly intrinsic to this work-as-portrai- portraying “subject” end up resembling each other and almost ture is the already mentioned fact that the painter invariably coinciding, in a way that seems oen to happen in Clemente’s positions himself – and remains almost uninterruptedly during works. From portrait to self-portrait is a short step, and what the few hours of the sitting – as close as possible to his subject subtends them both is a form of love – whether for the self or (unlike the traditional portrait artists, who tended to keep a dis- for the other (the two can coincide) makes no difference. More- tance, so that they might size up their subject: as Velázquez did over, as Coomaraswamy warns us: for the portraits and self-portrait in Las Meninas). It is as “is is … a fuller identity than the mere sympathy of two though Clemente wanted to reduce to a minimum not only individuals ; and each as individual has now no more signifi- every possible distraction of his gaze (and that of his subject), cance for the other than the gates of heaven for one who stands but also every possible mental interference between that gaze 138 Francesco Pellizzi: Towards the “Apostles” of Francesco Clemente non-hypogeal – is equally rapid and light in the way it immerses itself, each time, in its subject. In a poem from his Miniature a mia madre (New York 1992, p. 54), the artist wrote: nella parete interna della tomba il tuffatore è come una piuma (on the inner wall of the tomb the diver is like a feather) But to remain for a moment close to the roots of our Western representation, let us remember that the “Shaman” seen in pro- file who turns his head towards us, as he dances disguised as a stag on the wall of the Cave of Trois-Frères in south-western France (fig.1), may be regarded as a self-portrait, just as every 1. Cave drawing, The Sorcerer, Trois Frères, Ariège. portrait that looks directly at us tends to become irresistibly “specular” for us. It is a particular aspect of how we reflect our- selves continually in others, whose reflections and reflexivity form and deform us continuously, just as their appearances and his hand: for the latter is required to translate, as immedi- stimulate in us a fundamental instinct for mimesis and identifi- ately as possible, the intensity (not always so easy to sustain) of cation. And it is thus that the hunter approaches his prey, so the encounter between the gazes of the two subjects. If this be that in killing it he also kills himself. e primary root of the so, we need to ask what is the nature and the manner of the self-portrait, its darkest and most obscure source, could be pre- artist’s self-portraying gaze, which as we shall try to show, is the cisely this primary identification with the victim on the part of primary objective for him as opposed to the portrayal of the a hunter, which is then transformed, at the dawn of agriculture, other subject. into the sacrificial offering (that is inevitably associated with the sacrificer himself, or whoever represents him). In the passage * * * from Palaeolithic hunt to Neolithic offering the victim changes from subject to object, but the intrinsic link with the con- We could speculate that the repeated images of hands by the sciousness that governs it is not broken. e portrait is itself a “Painter of the Crooked Little Finger”, possibly the first but cer- kind of capture – the capturing of an appearance, and through tainly the greatest among the artists of the Chauvet cave (about it also that of the glimmer of another consciousness. And so 30,000 years ago), so emphatically applied to the undulating the self-portrait, in turn, places the appearance of the self as walls of the cave, might have amounted to his “signature” (they though of an, or the, other, or as though it were an offering and certainly help us to identify him today, as does his pictorial sacrifice of self, on the altar of appearance. Of all this, Francesco “style”), whereas the animals that he painted may all have been Clemente’s vast work of portraiture and self-portraiture seems – among other things – self-portraits, perhaps in some way to be perhaps the most sophisticated and present (to itself ) oneiric and not entirely self-aware, “as a lion”, “as a horse”, “as a expression today. rhinoceros”, and so on. To enter into the cave, even before a In several of the most significant and last exponents of landslide sealed its grandiose entrance, must have been, in day- what we have come to call (perhaps with a residue of Enlight- light, like passing from light into shadows, and at night, like enment optimism) the “modern consciousness”, there has been attaining another brightness – another way of seeing – by the a kaleidoscopic diffraction of the self, which is portrayed and light of burning torches. We do not need to invoke the Lucien expressed in innumerable ways and under masks as surprising Lévi-Bruhl’s theory on empathy to imagine a world of subter- as that of the dancer at Trois-Frères. Fernando Pessoa, for ranean identification – but perhaps not exactly oneiric (at any instance – that spirit of a modernity so radical that he felt the rate in the usual meaning of the word) – with the source of the need to mask it in various traditional (and quasi-esoteric) forms most vital, nutritional forces hovering over the surface of the – could be seen as the supreme poet of the self-portrait in the earth.3 We could say, by analogy though in a very different sense, twentieth century, of the impossible self-portrait, even. Because that the portraits and self-portraits of Francesco Clemente if Baudelaire’s coeur mis à nu is the unconditional offering of pursue in their fashion this diurnal vision of the shadows of Romantic revelation, the systematic occultation of the heart– by beings (and of being), and the nocturnal vision of their own Kaa, and Duchamp, onwards – is its necessary Late-Modern light.
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  • Francesco Clemente
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  • Francesco Clemente
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  • FRANCESCO CLEMENTE September 7 Through November 10, 2012
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  • Francesco Clemente
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  • Bibliography Francesco Clemente
    Bibliography Francesco Clemente BIBLIOGRAPHY—Solo Exhibition Catalogues (chronological) (Gratis 1978) Gratis. Exhibition catalogue and artist’s book. Geneva: Centre d’Art Contemporain, 1978. (P.M.F.C. 1978) Francesco Clemente P.M.F.C. Exhibition catalogue. Cologne: Galerie Paul Maenz, 1978. (Undae Clemente flamina pulsae 1978) Undae Clemente flamina pulsae. Exhibition catalogue and artist’s book. Amsterdam: Art & Project, 1978. (Lisson 1979) Exhibition catalogue. London: Lisson Gallery, 1979. (Non Scopa 1979) Francesco Clemente: Non Scopa. Exhibition catalogue and artist’s book. Turin: Gian Enzo Sperone, 1979. (Milan 1980) Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan, “Francesco Clemente,” dates unknown, 1980. Catalogue with text by Germano Celant. (Sperone Westwater Fischer 1980) Exhibition catalogue. New York: Sperone Westwater Fischer, 1980. (Maenz 1980) Francesco Clemente. Exhibition catalogue. Cologne: Galerie Paul Maenz, 1980. (Art & Project 1980–81) New Works. Exhibition catalogue. Amsterdam: Art & Project, 1980–81. (Matrix 1981) Francesco Clemente/Matrix 46. Exhibition brochure. Berkeley: University Art Museum, University of California, 1981. (Pinxit 1981) Francesco Clemente Pinxit. Exhibition catalogue and artist’s book. London: Anthony d’Offay Gallery, 1981. (Bischofberger 1981) Francesco Clemente: New Works. Exhibition catalogue. Zurich: Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, 1981. (Viaggatore Napoletano 1982) Francesco Clemente: Il viaggiatore napoletano. Exhibition catalogue and artist’s book. Cologne: Galerie Paul Maenz, 1982. (Bischofberger 1982–83) Francesco Clemente: Watercolours. Exhibition catalogue and artist’s book. Zurich: Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, 1982–83. (Fourteen Stations 1983) Francesco Clemente: The Fourteen Stations. Exhibition catalogue. London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1983. (Sperone Westwater/Boone 1983) Francesco Clemente. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Sperone Westwater; New York: Mary Boone Gallery, 1983. (White Shroud 1984) Allen Ginsberg/Francesco Clemente: White Shroud.
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