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. And it is here a question, as at Chauvet and much later at (i.e. inescapably Modernist) condition. Not by chance, in many Lascaux, of a glance, and of a hand, whose touch – even though works by Francesco Clemente referring to his persona (i.e. his Francesco Pellizzi: Towards the “Apostles” of Francesco Clemente 139
this is not the case with the first self-portraits, which are – necessarily – those of “artists”: and it has been said that they came into being together with the making and availability of the first large mirrors. However that may be, in Francesco Clemente, and in other twentieth-century artists (Egon Schiele, Max Beckmann, de Chirico, to mention only a few, but perhaps also Picasso), self-portraits precede the portrait: as though not only modern artists, now, but also Modernist and Post-Avant- gardist (or post-Duchamp) artists who wants fully to express themselves as such, precisely in their rejection of every kind of 2. Francesco Clemente, Self-Portrait with Skull, 2002, “academy”, were obliged to revisit and reexamine the represen- Private Collection. tational, beginning with their Renaissance roots. So-called Modernist (and so-called Post-Modernist) “primitivism” is also fixated, perhaps most of all, on the self-portrait (fig.2). mask, or appearance), the heart is represented at the centre of It was Dürer (so markedly present in the collections of the being, but also, very oen, as sacrificed-sacralised, i.e. separated Drawings and Prints Department of the Uffizi) who first por- from the forces of Being and of Eros that contend for it. While trayed not only his own likeness but the awareness of this new he was painting my portrait for the Uffizi Tarots, Francesco relationship, in representation, between the identity of the Clemente told me: “e sun is the heart, and the heart is the artist-subject and its manual externalisation (akin to the intel- sun. e sun is double, like the heart.” lectual one which the first humanists and their followers, from Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch onwards, expressed in their writ- * * * ings), i.e. between the specular face (necessarily reversed from
What then is this separation that isolates the body-as-cadaver (then assumed in the Resurrection as Body-of-the-Son-of-Man) and finally, in the portrait/self-portrait, and duplicates it as a memory? Memento mori is one of the expressions of the aware- ness of this tension between soma and reminiscence, so it is not surprising that the skull is so oen present in portraits of the early Renaissance. It is also significant that these portraits, so numerous in our public and private collections, aer so many centuries still have no title other than “Anonymous portrait”: there is a sharp contrast between the vivacity and uniqueness of the individual features which these works celebrate and pre- serve, and the loss of their name. Onomastic inscriptions, in fact, oen accompanied older and more generic classical and medieval representations, while the Saints were identified by their canonical attributes (as in Francesco Clemente’s Self-Por- traits as Apostles), which characterised not only the salient fea- tures of their stories but also their names. But the physiognomy of the melancholic young man with his index finger closed in a prayerbook, and the features of the somewhat older gentleman with the skull, regarded (by Burckhardt) as an affirmation of the new Renaissance (and Western) individuality, were cer- tainly recognised by many of their contemporaries: time has hidden their identity, and in time it has been cancelled. “What’s in a name ?” e memory of names, as in the aristocratic Poly- nesian genealogies, can last for millennia, while the visual (and oral) transmission of likenesses becomes lost, for the most part, within three generations. us, many of the first modern por- traits, “anonymous portraits”, transmit as much as they hide of the history of their subjects (down to that Jeune homme à la tête 3. Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait with Studies of the Artist’s Left Hand de mort, 1896–98, by Cézanne, in the Barnes Foundation). But and a Pillow, 1493, New York, e Metropolitan Museum of Art. 140 Francesco Pellizzi: Towards the “Apostles” of Francesco Clemente right to le) and its making, or the passage from the hieratic them, behind his hands the maker vanishes again, because they and acheiropoietic image of the Mandylion (or of the Holy appear, in the virtuoso nature of their interpenetrated perfec- Shroud) to the already “modern” (in its self-awareness) secular tion, as though they were, once again, acheiropoietai.10 character of the gesture that transposes the memory of it In almost all the self-portraits in the Uffizi exhibition, the (fig.3).4 In the proto-Hellenistic Magna Grecia (Francesco hands of Clemente-Apostle recur centrally, and always with Clemente’s birth place) of antiquity, there were vase painters expressive prominence ; but the hand self-portraits of Dürer are who portrayed themselves (or other artists), such as the one now a distant memory: there is, rather, an echo of the hands who represents (in painting) the act of sculpting (and then of that appeared with great force a few years ago in certain of the painting) the “portrait” of a demi-god, which in turn is himself artist’s large paintings that had been inspired by his contact with represented nearby, while observing the scene, it would appear Brazilian Candomblé (fig.5).11 We sense the same prodigious contentedly, in a complex conjunction of three representational charge, the same vocation (literally) for the miracle-as-making, registers, which already in some way anticipates (like so many which is the prerogative of the Messenger-Martyr (indeed, of other aspects of our times) an almost modern awareness of the the “Apostle”), but also for us, we can say, the glorious and tor- “artistic” practice and subject.5 But in Dürer’s self-portrayed mented duty and burden of the artist. “Ya no hay monstruos”, hand – a hand that reveals its own structure – there is more than wrote the Mexican painter Julio Galàn (much admired by that “reflexion of the whole person, which is proportionate to Warhol and Clemente), on one of his painted ceramic globes ; the whole” (of which Nicholas Cusanus had written, a gener a- but the hands of the Clemente-Apostle perhaps say or imply tion before):6 it affirms, as Joseph Koerner well saw, that here how, in a radical way, it must be recognised that miraculous the self-portrait, “meta-picture, so to speak, reveals the artist as hands are more precarious and powerless in our world than they a total being”,7 even though his “contours appeared to the artist ever were. In other words, they are hands for which the “magic” himself only in a mirror: i.e. they are not what he sees of himself (any magic, especially the last remaining kind, artistic magic) within his own experience of his body”.8 Surprisingly again (if we cannot but be regarded as somewhat suspect, because it invests, recall that Dürer’s are the first self-portraits – with the possible of necessity, objects destined to lose power (and are thus irre- exceptions of Fouquet and Memling – that present themselves deemably ambiguous, like fetishes). e prayer expressed by the as such, once again, as fully self-aware), this specular and there- hands of Clemente is if anything the distant heir of the one that fore total vision is rooted in a spirituality that is still in some emerged like an inscribed girdle from the mouth of a late- way “medieval” – not only symbolic, but fundamentally religious medieval donor ;12 but this one, fully identifying with the artist (fig.4).9 So, by natural progression, from here we move to those himself (Rembrandt docet), speaks only to himself – or at the extremely famous but oen “trivialised” Praying Hands (lacking most interrogates his spectator, alter ego beyond the mirror both initials and date), the last self-portrait of the artist’s hands, (fig.6). And yet, self-knowledge stimulated by its own which are like the limit where the hand that draws itself in the appearance is so much more than an affirmation of “self ”. Just act of drawing is here joined to the hand portrayed (necessarily as Emily Dickinson wrote, “But Magic hath an element/ Like the le) and thus reminds its maker of devotion, indeed of Deity to keep!”13, so too, in a different vein, Emanuele Severino prayer; but in this final representational gesture that invests reminds us:
4. Albrecht Dürer, Praying Hands (Study for “Heller Altar”), 1508, Wien, Albertina.
5. Francesco Clemente, Self-Portrait as St. Thaddeus (detail, hands), 2011. Francesco Pellizzi: Towards the “Apostles” of Francesco Clemente 141
6. Francesco Clemente, Self-Portrait as St. Andrew (detail, hands), 2011.
7. Francesco Clemente, Self-Portrait as Judas (detail, Judas and Christ), 2011.
8. Francesco Clemente, Self-Portrait as St. Simon (detail, face), 2011.
One can speak of the appearance of the world (or of the Indies.15 But there is also in New Testament tradition (canon ical appearance that lies at the base of every thought and every as well as heterodox) a reversal of the story of St. omas, action of mortals), only because such an appearance according to which he alone was called upon to assist in person appears. And the appearance of the appearance means to at the Assumption of the Virgin, and to bear witness to the be the appearance of itself. It is the fundamental sense other Apostles, who remained incredulous, until they saw the that the “I” can assume in the thought of mortals. How- empty tomb and the girdle which the Madonna unclasped and ever the world, whose appearance appears, is the world of allowed to fall from heaven for omas.16 is scene was oen becoming other … inevitably something that, in as much represented in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (before the as it is achieved, is other than the achiever, or is that Council of Trent), and could even be described as a “counter- otherness which cannot be being itself, the identity of part” to the one already mentioned in which inscribed girdles which the “I” consists.14 rise from the mouth of the donor towards the Virgin-who- intercedes. However that may be, it reappears in the Self-Por- But how to portray oneself without distraction ? For the other trait as St. omas in the Uffizi exhibition, where the author’s self in the mirror is a distraction. Only by transmuting itself into self-image is split into two profiles, that of the Saint and that an icon can the self-portraying distraction exorcise the demons of Jesus, as also occurs in the Self-Portrait as Judas (Iscariot) of a hyper-conscious interiority, reprojecting it onto the impen- (figs.7, 8)17. From the Doubting to the Betrayal is a short step, etrable surface of the image of non-psychological states of being but in both cases there is a single identity that splits into two – ontic conditions that can assume an emblematic character: and observes itself, as image and as body. But the girdle here ties the Apostle who explores the Risen body; the one who sets the mysterious (feminine ?) arm that descends from above to about kissing-designating his sacrificial Double ; the one who touch the le hand of the artist-saint who presses it to his side. despite his triple denial nevertheless holds the Keys of We are immersed in an almost Gnostic atmosphere where the Heaven… Everything is as though fixed in paradigmatic immo- human and the Divine, the male and the female, doubt and cer- bility. As Francesco Clemente once told me: “Minimum move- tainty, contrast in their complementarity (fig.9). is image, in ment, maximum spirituality.” the dynamic equilibrium of its parts, the skilful disposal of It has been said that incredulity is the only true foundation colours (both strong and measured) against a dark background, of Faith, which cannot be reduced to an ingenuous “belief ”, nor the silent “conversation” between the figures (including the to a sentimental impulse, but is the fruit of a cognitive “leap” of almost invisible one that witnesses and protects from above), the whole being, involving the body as well as the mind. is has a Renaissance aura: but entirely modern is the possibly is perhaps one of the meanings of the New Testament episode implied sense of an oedipal conflict, where the hand of the of the doubting of St. omas the Apostle, evangeliser of the mother-sister barely compensates for the vertiginous attraction 142 Francesco Pellizzi: Towards the “Apostles” of Francesco Clemente
9. / 10. Francesco Clemente, Self-Portrait as St. Thomas (detail, arm and girdle / finger in the wound), 2011. Francesco Pellizzi: Towards the “Apostles” of Francesco Clemente 143 of the vulva-wound of the father-brother. Compare it to these two images: the oil Self-Portrait in White, Red and Black III, and the watercolour Androgyne Self-Portrait III (figs. 17, 16), are examples of a recurrent and insoluble allowing oneself to be bewitched by the mysteries of every kind of otherness, whether sexual, corporal or spiritual (fig.10). St.omas was not nicknamed Didymos, “the twin” (John 11:16 and 20:24) by chance.18 Long before doubting, omas was ready to die with Jesus, and the twin is a brother par excel- lence. Few texts, apparently, name omas’s twin, but in the Book of omas the Contender (or the Athlete), which was part of the Nag Hammadi Library, he is said to be Jesus himself: “now, because it has been said that you are my twin, and true companion, examine yourself…” But this “examining”, as the artist well knows, also given his participation in certain eastern 11. Francesco Clemente, Self-Portrait as Daughter of the World traditions, is neither easy nor without danger: see here, for (Self-Portrait with Cockroach), 1996, Private Collection. example, (fig.11) the Self-Portrait as Daughter of the World (Self- Portrait with Cockroach), where the memory of Kaa is obvi- ously not far off. As for the Shaman, the forces of Good (i.e. those that are not “daughters of the world”) are continually (our own) death” (see for example Sacrificial Self-Portrait, 2001 threatened, even to the point of themselves becoming ambiva- (fig.13), which also evokes the ancient Vedic horse sacrifice), in lent. Not by chance is there a reference to the local cult of some cases, as in the recent Self-Portrait as Ravana, 2007 St.omas’s relics in the hymn of the poet Ephrem the Syrian (fig.14), it is the mythological element that allows the artist (died A.D. 373), who cries to the Devil: to multiply himself, and to multiply the manifestations of his demonic appearance – even in androgynous form23 (figs.15, 16).24 … into what land shall I fly from the just ? To return for a moment to what can be read in the Self-Por- I stirred up Death the Apostles to slay, trait as St.omas: we have seen that its “virginal” girdle might that by their death I might escape their blows. correspond to the one that emerges, like the “word-clouds” in But harder still am I now stricken: pre-Colombian codices, from the mouth of the donor (laws, the Apostle I slew in India has overtaken me sacrificer-sacrificed) ; it is a prayer that links the donor’s portrait in Edessa ; here or there it is all he. to the transcendent (to the Divine) and through this invoca- ere went I, and there was he: tion makes of his image a votive self-portrait. But is this not here and there to my grief I find him.19 also that infinitely consoling Word that descends like the gir- dle of the Virgin of the Assumption, with which she blesses is “devil”, the embodiment of the “Dionysiac” forces and St.omas, the “twin” who doubted her divine Son ? (Precisely impulses that are impossible to control, is fully present (and is never suppressed in “Augustinian” fashion) in the Hindu and Tantric-Buddhist traditions which Clemente imbibed early, and it reappears in the artist’s self-portraits, sometimes in shame- lessly priapic-Parthenopean form: see here Self-Portrait in an Imperial Age (fig.12) of 2005, which was exhibited not in the state of New York (“e Imperial State”), but in London, where little now remains to commemorate the Empire.20 is demonic dimension (but let us not forget the Socratic daimon, and its appearances in Plato’s Symposium), is also a residual form of that destructiveness inherent in all sacrifice.21 In such cases, the self-image, whether total or partial, as in certain ex-votos (loved and “imitated” by Clemente: one might think again of the descending arm in the Self-Portrait as St.omas), is an offer- ing that might indicate even a corporeal identification with the sacred, in all of its forms.22 us, if the loss of one’s own head, or self-decapitation, may allude to altered states of consciousness 12. Francesco Clemente, Self-Portrait in an Imperial Age, 2005, and such experiences, which transport us, so to speak, “beyond Collection of the artist. 144 Francesco Pellizzi: Towards the “Apostles” of Francesco Clemente
essence. e self-portrait is thus located again and again, obses- sively, in the time-place of an insoluble doubt regarding the actual making that gives it form: the representational action – from the Palaeolithic cave to Plato’s cave (and on down to us) – translates-betrays the Absent in the fleeting glare of a torchlight that for an instant rouses and eternalises it. e body both is and is not: it is the body of the twin that one can still touch, and it is one’s own body that in the instant of touching it becomes that of another twin, ad infinitum … Doubt in the body-image that remains, doubt in one’s own body-image and in the ever-new, ever-“identical” resurrection (fig.17).25
* * *
It is certainly not by chance that Francesco Clemente has cho- sen the Twelve Apostles as the theme for the room of self-por- traits to accompany the great series of his “cards” inspired by the Renaissance tarots. If we might say, in fact, that the Apostles of the New Testament are in some way both the evocation and the opposite of the biblical Prophets – since they are the wit- nesses, messengers and announcers not of a Promise but of a new Presence (or Revelation) that is already in action – in the 13. Francesco Clemente, Sacrificial Self-Portrait, 2001, context of their representation as self-portraits by the artist, at Private Collection. the Uffizi, they also constitute a sort of retaliation to the man- tic vocation represented in the human cosmography (“[almost] because he is his “twin” – who doubts just as He, the Other, all my friends”) of the Veronese pseudo-cards. “e Fool” (in doubted on the Cross – omas cannot believe that He is “alive this case the artist himself ) takes part in the game of appear- and kicking”). It is thus that the doubt of the brother apostle, ances-presences that surround him, and in the instances of their “Messenger of the Indies”, became dematerialised in the hypo - interaction (according to rules whose hermeneutic virtue can stasis, and then in the eastern iconostasis. Yet, the Modern (and only manifest itself a posteriori), while the “Apostle” can only Modernist ; see Bataille) West remains anchored to the spir - offer the image of himself (and that of his artistic martyrdom), itual/materialistic dialectic, from which it cannot detach itself in the hope of his own transmutation – the miracle, and the except, very oen, at the price of abysmal (or en abime) in - (necessarily tragic) limits of his own coming. So I do not think genuity. Francesco Clemente knows how to negotiate this razor’s edge, from which he continues to depict and portray the border between meta-rationalism and trans-materialism, between thymos and physis, between mind (in the heart) and nature. e self-portrait itself, then, is also the externalisation of a “twin”, at the same time infinitely close (identity) and infinitely distant (otherness), and omas’s doubting is also that of the artist (poietés) in the presence of his own specular image: a mak- ing that does not disappear when the subject moves away from the mirror. However, whereas the portrait of Dorian Gray changes over time, as though it were a mirror inside the sub- ject’s soul, in a sort of spiritual meta-realism that embodies the dissolution of being in a sort of death-in-life, the self-portrait that fixes the image of a particular moment of spiritual-corpor- eal embodiment is necessarily the product of an idealisation: as such, in our tradition it always corresponds, more or less inci- sively and “metaphysically”, to an absolute model which takes form somewhere behind the maker’s back, but which he alone 14. Francesco Clemente, Self-Portrait as Ravana, 2007, can seize, like the ever-departing shadow of his own presence- Private Collection. Francesco Pellizzi: Towards the “Apostles” of Francesco Clemente 145
15. Ardhanarishvara with Nandi, the Great Temple at anjavur, North face of sanctuary walls.
16. Francesco Clemente, Androgyne Self-Portrait III, 2005, Private Collection.
17. Francesco Clemente, Self-Portrait in White, Red and Black III, 2008, Collection of the artist.
that one can speak of these Self-Portraits as the Twelve Apostles with ornament (and de Chirico brilliantly adopted that vein). at the Uffizi without casting a backward glance at the long series ree centuries later, and aer Cézanne had definitively evis- of Clemente’s self-portraits, and primarily at the admirable Self- cerated the classic pictorial portrait (see, for instance, his “youth- Portrait (Crucifixion) of 1982 (fig.18), which is an early and ful” Portrait du peintre Achille Empéraire, of 1868, in the Palais complex paradigm: a great concentration and fluidity of form, d’Orsay, but also the extreme Autoportrait avec un béret, of a transparent reflexivity of brushwork, and a rapt trans-human 1898–1900, in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts) and Max aura appear refracted in harmonious waves of light, shade, and Beckmann had re-proposed it with an iconic autobiographical colour, beneath the penetrating and sweetly hypnotic gaze of expressivity (from the extraordinary self-portrait drawing with the subject. It is as though since then the image-in-itself – with wide-open mouth of 1901, at least until the Self-Portrait by Day almost hallucinated insistence (we may, once again, think of and Dream, with beret à la Cézanne, ca.1944, in the Albright- Van Gogh) – questioned the consistence and very possibility Knox Museum in Buffalo), it is as if Clemente had undertaken of the self-as-image. e latter is perhaps related to that nar- to dissolve his own presence as persona (i.e. as “mask-appear- coleptic “neighbour” to whom Emily Dickinson alludes in the ance”), and thus also as maker, through his myriad of images. epigraph to this essay, and which we must “lose”, perhaps more Repetition, here, is not intended to affirm, but if anything to than “[only] one time”, but again and again, until the final weaken any illusion of continuity, so that in connection with moment. If there is a painting, among those of Francesco Clemente’s profusion of portraits and self-portraits the words of Clemente’s early maturity, that already seems to distil his artis- Nabokov come to mind, with their almost nihilist echoes, in tic presence into a summa of extreme concentration, it is this e Eye: very self-portrait, which not by chance immediately follows his “For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors extraordinary (and “difficult”) Fourteen Stations of the Cross. that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the popula- is vision (in the literal sense) is already centred not so much tion of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they on an image of himself – in as much as this begins here to reap- live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist … To be pear in its characteristic depersonalising intensity – as, once nothing but a big, slightly vitreous, somewhat bloodshot, again, on an image-as-self.26 But this “self ” – in our later mod - unblinking eye. I swear this is happiness. A fetus in reverse, my ernity – cannot in fact appear except as an irreducibly illusory image, too, will dwindle and die within that last witness of the surface (see, for instance, the finger of omas that penetrates crime I’ve committed by the mere fact of living.”28 the dark cave of Christ’s side), so that, paradoxically, post- Judaeo-Christian personal existence as a crime to be expi- Enlightenment scepticism almost comes to coincide with the ated (but now already expiated on the Cross), and Hindu-Bud- discovery of traditional wisdoms.27 dhist personal existence as a karmic burden to be le behind, It was perhaps Rembrandt who inaugurated the self-por- if possible, once and for all: the Christian novelty is the Resur- trait as camouflage: the soul plonked down like a mask laden rection of the Body (not its preservation, as in Egypt), which 146 Francesco Pellizzi: Towards the “Apostles” of Francesco Clemente in some way restores Eden. In the quasi-Christian register of William Blake, here touched something so profound, or philo- the Self-Portrait (Crucifixion, 1982, fig. 18) personal existence is genetically primary, such as those amygdalic instincts that we not however a crime to be expiated by self-sacrifice, in a rela- share with the Serpent … ”Given the choice between the expe- tion of tension with the transcendent, but as a moment in the rience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain” (William circular movement of a thaumaturgic-epiphanic trinity. (See in Faulkner, e Wild Palms). this vein the Self-Portrait as St. Andrew, also at the Uffizi.) Self- sacrifice is only one of the transmuting “vehicles”, and compas- * * * sion here begins chez soi. Symbolically, the subject seems to oscillate between the emblems of the Cross and those of the As we have already seen, the Palaeolithic dancer depicted in the Amphibian, mediators from opposite realms: “Perhaps he cave of Trois-Frères (the first self-portrait ?) is already masked: he will reflect with a certain melancholy that Greek mythology is and is not himself, concealed behind animal appearances. does not know the word resurrection” (Zbigniew Herbert, Since then, the mask covers and evokes the Absent, the Other “Antaeus”). ere is something disturbing and almost sus- who accompanies our every move, but also those vital forces pended in the iconography of this image if we stare at it intently. that transcend the human. A fairly recent painting by Clemente Is the almost transparent animal form that of a frog, or perhaps is called Self-Portrait with and without Mask of 2005 (fig. 19) – the memory of a woman’s body, or that of an alter ego? e pos- and the mask in question is not only that of a pig, but also one sibilities are not mutually exclusive. What is certain is that the that reproduces the artist’s own features. But the ambiguity of overall structure of this image brings to mind one of those elab- this quadripartite image (two human faces, two porcine) is orate masks with which the Eskimos “captured” the spirits of highly complex, because it is the artist’s hand itself (a return, their ancestors so they could return (but not for too long) once again, to that of Dürer, or of Beckmann ?) that holds the among them, and this accentuates the self-portrait’s sense of mask up to the two faces: a Clemente mask that might conceal otherness and extraneity: the strange asymmetrical nostrils, the (but never completely) the pig’s snout, in one case, and a “parrot-like” shadow beneath the le eye, the quadri-partition porcine mask that reveals the underlying human features, in the of the face ( foreground as microcosm), the white of the eyes that other ; so we can no longer tell whether the human hides the overflows (a device almost à la Matisse) – everything makes us animal, or vice versa ; or what is – if such exists – the “true” face doubt: as if the evocation of the Crucifixion, in an echo of of the artist (fig.20). e death-mask is a sort of self-portrait of the dead person, in extremis. But as Giacometti wrote when he kept watch by the bedside of the dying Georges Braque: “e adventure, the great adventure, is to see something unknown arise each day in the same face, which is something greater than all the voyages in the world.”29 While Clemente’s portraits are the image of individual moments of the persons portrayed (somethings repeated at a distance of years, like those that have transmitted to us the fea- tures of Mme Cézanne), it is in the exploration-representation of his own face that he has always found a new pretext to make “something unknown arise”. Masks of himself, i.e. appearances that reveal the caducity of every appearance ; mobile fixity and rigid vivacity, but as impenetrable as factual data. During the very days when he was painting his Apostles (transposing his fea- tures into those of absent ancestors), Clemente had a mask of his own face made of plaster and gauze, for a gala party en tête, which he then painted with his own features, like the lid of an Egyptian sarcophagus or one of the Fayum funerary portraits (fig.21). is gesture, somewhat Grand-Guignol but effective (the mask won him first prize), might recall certain B movies in the horror category, or the heavy makeup of the silent screen, or perhaps the comic effect of that scene in a film of Jerry Lewis, in which he plays a hospital orderly with “neurotic identifica- tion empathy” ends up rolling precipitously down a hill as a 18. Francesco Clemente, Self-Portrait (Crucifixion), 1982, plaster-encased mummy (fig.22). Yet something disturbing Private Collection. sneaks into the masquerade, such as when Clemente dressed in Francesco Pellizzi: Towards the “Apostles” of Francesco Clemente 147
solve by this profusion the memory of individual self-portraits), an almost animal awareness of the environment that conditions the subject: how does an owl really see? At midday it is almost blind (fig.24). It has perhaps been taken too much for granted that there is one way of seeing, and of seeing ourselves, that does not involve us. is game of infinite reflections that constantly attracts us, from all directions, may be difficult to bear (even for the puer aeternus that dwells in us): thus might we experience the gaze of the Clemente self-portraits, if they all surrounded us at one time and in one place, observing us with the same intensity that we observe them. Like the Nepalese shaman in a hut with his drums, the painter arouses something, in his stu- dio, a physiognomy of organs and emotions, emblematically linked, like heraldic banners of precarious, perhaps also (liter- ally) ecstatic, conditions ; but it is impossible not to be struck by the great, albeit pitiless, compassion for the self they emanate – for ‘one’s own’ self as well as for ‘the other’s’: weep now, smile later. If Clemente’s self-portraits succeed one another incessantly (we might almost say, obsessively), in various guises, throughout his artistic career, the biographical episodes feed them, but of these they are the mask rather than the essence. eir sequence (or ‘theoria’, as in certain Byzantine mosaics), never interrupted, invests the time of life as that of the cosmos itself, indefinitely cyclical.32 So if the mask is never one, it is this very tension that we have tried to call “natural” between the singularity of the 19. Francesco Clemente, Self-Portrait with and without the Mask, 2005, Private Collection.
20. Reproduction of a mask with its original inner face, Courtesy of the Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History.
drag, with veil, high heels and fishnet tights appears for that “Carnivalesque” procession in Greenwich Village, in which “the dead return” (and which announces the lengthening of wintry shadows), now confusedly celebrated as Halloween. In therio - morphism, as in the fracture and duplication of mundane iden- tity, there is moreover something that alludes to the rite in which the presence-absence of the Ancestor is evoked and mani fested – i.e. a transposed identity, conscious but not slav- ishly determined by its time, or its place (fig.23).30 e masks are always those of the god, or of the hero of a thousand faces: in his continual masking-unmasking Francesco Clemente dis- covers both the sources of the myth and its literary traces (as for example in his work on e Departure of the Argonauts, in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York) ; but this personal philo-mythology, in its modern “detachment” (and Emanuele Severino reminds us that Aristotle pointed this out), is also a philosophy.31 Is there perhaps, in the plethora of Clemente’s self-portraits 21. Plaster mask of Francesco Clemente, home of F.and A. Clemente, (in itself somewhat suspect, as though the artist wanted to dis- New York, Spring 2011; photo: Francesco Pellizzi. 148 Francesco Pellizzi: Towards the “Apostles” of Francesco Clemente
22. Francesco Clemente wearing his own mask in his studio, April 2011; photo: F. Carrozzini.
subject and the plurality of the forces and presences that ani- “I’d like reality to be a picture, like the surface of a shell…”, mate it and populate its world, on various levels of conscious- Francesco Clemente said to me once. But how do we dissolve ness, of the unconscious, and of what for lack of a better word the image of ourselves onto this surface ? Simply ignoring it is we may call trans-consciousness, altered experience, or in the last not an effective solution. Solve et coagula: the person, this bun- analysis a teratological vision of self ‘beyond-this-life’ – as in dle of matter, resists being melted into infinitesimal elements William Burroughs: so we can better intuit what must have (in the end, into pure energy) or being assumed into heaven. It been some of the powerful connections between Clemente’s is prisoner of the “magic square”, between two realities that are auto-poietico-imaginative world and aspects of the Hindu poly- more “immediate” than those two possible transformations but theist tradition: for already in classical Greco-Roman poly- similarly elusive (see the intense and almost hallucinatory gaze thesim (whose traces are so strongly present in the artist’s native of the Subject in the Self-Portrait with the Planet Mars (fig. 25) land, and in his aesthetic makeup – it is enough to think of the 2005: today, the old dilemma represented by the opposition paintings in the Archaeological Museum in Naples, or the fres- between “inside” and “outside” (soul and body) is as though coes of Pompeii and Herculaneum), and in the philosophical exploded in a metastasis of images where we do not escape the reflections that accompanied its end, there is a strong (post- surfaces, whatever they represent – the skin or the entrails. But Christian) tendency towards the Univocal.33 But in this, too, it Clemente’s meta-bodies belong to another reality: they seem to is a bit as though in such an extreme empowering of every pos- exist in a space between worlds, which is not simply that of the sible self-conscious movement, of the spirit as of the body (or image, but nor its it that of the fetish. One might have been rather, of both of them in one), we approached that void which tempted to see them as “emblematic” (especially in the specific according to certain eastern traditions is germane to the most context of the Uffizi show) were it not for the never-slackened fundamental conditions of consciousness.34 intensity of their personal quality ; or as the precipitate of some kind of magic of experience and its transformations, if the * * * demanding discipline which nevertheless supports its mani fes- Francesco Pellizzi: Towards the “Apostles” of Francesco Clemente 149
23. Francesco Pellizzi, Self-Portrait wearing F. Clemente’s Mask, New York, April 2011.
24. Francesco Clemente, Self-Portrait (the first Self-Portrait), 1979, Zurich, Collection Bruno Bischofberger.
25. Francesco Clemente, Self-Portrait with Mars, 2005, Private Collection.
tations, oen simultaneously Saturnine and (almost) joyful, did subject whether portrait or self-portrait, a closeness that is full not seem to respond to impulses strangely lacking in will, pos- of discovery, danger, and uncertainty, that constitutes the cen- sibly analogous to those which James Hillman has called “the tre of his artistic challenge. And it is perhaps here that the artist enthusiastic liquidity of the soul” (Senex and Puer). participates “in that very subtle, but elementary and human Two principal strategies are enacted to deal with the body reaction that … we might call modesty”. It might seem a para- in question: a bold pursuance of a closeness that brings risks for dox, in the case of Clemente’s almost barefaced expressiveness, one’s identity (as we have seen in the practice of portraiture), yet I believe that in his case, too, we can conclude, with Savinio, and the related one of projection (transformation) of the Self that “this is the reason that induces the artist, despite himself, (figs.26, 27). is is dis-tortion rather than de-formation, in some way to deform, in reproducing them, the terribly clear because the form is never weakened or diminished, but results aspects that he perceives”.35 from a compression-expansion of movement. Both procedures At the top of a large horizontal oil by Clemente, Pantheon tend towards the continued construction-deconstruction of Derby, appears a procession of sacred images of varied prov- a personal microcosm, i.e. an attempt (always recognised as enance, surmounting a scene of a football match (the subject of critically problematic) to re-insert into the event – which is the a large collage made in the 1970s, now in the Agnelli collection), representational act itself – a geography of Being, and of its viewed here through the net of one of the goals. A goal has just potentialities. And the scope and effect of both these move- ments appear to be that of defeating the irrevocably alien, the enemy, both within and without, casting a glance without scru- ples at the spectacle of the presence-to-the-world of the Subject itself. Neither Utopian nor a-topian, the artist’s beloved place- non-place is always restored to its primary state, which is that of every sentient being, in every instant of its existence. e recourse to disproportion is very ancient and has sometimes been subjected to curious explanations: there is even a theory (not a very reliable one, to tell the truth) that the extremely large buttocks and tiny heads (the “pearshaped” form) of the so-called Paleolithic “Venuses”, the earliest human representations, sculpted in the round on a very small scale, are due to the fact that they are in reality female self-portraits, and that the amply proportioned women who made them were copying their own reflections in standing water, the only kind of mirror available to them. However that might be, for Francesco 26. Francesco Clemente, Self-Portrait with Black Gloves, 1996, Clemente it is certainly the extreme, insistent closeness to his Private Collection. 150 Francesco Pellizzi: Towards the “Apostles” of Francesco Clemente been scored, and the ball has burst through the net and is rush- ing towards us. e sphere is however the head of the artist him- self, whose face (at least in the first version of the painting) is distorted by the impact into a grimace somewhere between contempt and pain. is sense of being in jeopardy to largely uncontrollable forces, despite the pantheon that presides over their “metatronic” game (or rather, as in Greek mythology and epic, precisely because of the actions-interactions of the myriad incarnation-representations of the Divine – as the Dalai Lama once told a group of pressphotographers: “You are all deities !”, without specifying which kind), permeates to a greater or lesser extent the artist’s entire self-representational oeuvre. We could almost say that it is its secret and principal moving force, and thus that what might appear as an obsession for self-portrayal justifies itself (as in the case of our Apostles) as a sort of personal, quasi “neo-Gnostic” cosmology. It oscillates between an iconic polytheism in which is reflected (as perhaps also in Luigi Ontani) the concordia discors of sublunary spirits and what, in an almost Franciscan vein, Clemente called one day, quoting Swedenborg – whose writings he had recently praised, as the reflection of “a parallel narrative, rooted in a style of life that corresponds to mine” – “a flame of love for oneself and for the world”.36
O strange face there in the glass ! O ribald company, O saintly host, O sorrow-swept my fool, What answer ? O ye myriad 27. Albrecht Dürer, Nude Self-Portrait, ca. 1503, at strive and play and pass, Klassik Stiung Weimar, Schlossmuseum im Jest, challenge, counterlie ! Stadtschloss I ? I ? I ? And ye ?
Ezra Pound, On his own face in a glass in Personae