Francesco Clemente

ArtForum, April, 1996 by Bruce Hainley

Although color may suggest questions, it will not answer them - red remains red, pink pink, blue blue. Anything read into red, pink, or blue is there but also not there at all, the way a curio can mean everything to one person, structuring some emotional vagary as something solid and resolute, and be just another item ready for the trash heap to someone else. Yet when looking at the dazzling palette in this taut miniretrospective of Francesco Clemente's paintings, how easy it is to state that here is someone using color to sort out the various manifestations (comic, horrific) of the self. Again and again, Clemente's beautiful head - attached to or severed from his body - in shades of umber, brick, and sugared pinks, raises questions of identity (Who am I? What does that mean?) that are inseparable from questions of paint (What are oils about? How do they differ from watercolors? Why these Piero della Francesca hues?). Such baby questions cut through not only the voluminous material written on Clemente (and his generation) but scrape away much of the angsty mess of neo-Expressionism and send Clemente's esthetic back to its fresh nativity.

In Untitled, 1980, a figure resembling Clemente in terra-cotta tones fills the right third of the painting. The background (what is not occluded by the figure) is broken into two sections, each painted in more shades than can be suggested by the words "cocoa" and "coffee." Clemente renders his figure with intensity: dark slashes of eyebrows, penetrating little eyes, nostrils aflare, sky-blue lips sealed to disallow any verbal communication (mimicking vision's silence); a freshet of the same blue emerges from his nasal passages, traces the side of the mouth, and is reflected in a greasy patch on the top of the chin. A little green-horned gremlin, throwing up blood, worms out from the figure's neck below the right ear; floating against the background, another leans over, holding in its hand a severed head whose hair streams down with waterfall force, vomit spewing from its mouth down the shoulder and side of the figure's torso, bound in orange coils. The painting manages to be sick of the self, of excess, and of paint while demonstrating the mastery required to get both to and beyond such a point. Clemente painted, proleptically, a response to the '80s before they really began despite his being in life one of that bulimic decade's handsomest poster boys.

Carrot-headed creatures and cock-suckers; vaginal openings and malicious doings; empty rooms filled with sunlight, dancing djinni smoke, and tiny mythic beings on pedestals; men, women, bodies dreamt from realms where there is no use for gender: capturing both the surreality and irreality of life in timbres of sunrise and sunset, Clemente is in silent conversation with himself about what it means to give form in paint to the ferocity and tenderness of the imagination. His ability to ravish jaded eyes that think they have seen everything, to leave anyone encountering his spooked enchantments speechless, comes from his abstaining from working in (as so many of his more notoriously famous cohorts have proved unable) other media to find what only oils, pigments, pastels, and watercolors can do. His vivid successes prove that just when you thought something (the '80s) was definitively over, what continues to make it interesting has not even really begun.

- Bruce Hainley