Artist: Francesco Clemente

Lévy Gorvy Dayan presents Francesco Clemente: Summer Love in the Fall, marking the venerated artist’s first exhibition at the gallery’s Beaux-Arts townhouse at 19 East 64th Street. Here, across multiple floors, Clemente debuts recent large-scale paintings in oil, watercolors, and frescoes, demonstrating his engagement with form and material—and melding artistic influences from India, West Africa, Egypt, and Italy to classical Greece and Rome. The subject of his new work is grounded in introspection and personal connection, echoing the expression penned by William Blake, “Love, the human form divine.”

Clemente’s figuration and symbolism can be felt and read across cultures, religions, and time—drawing inspiration from disparate geographies, mythologies, and antiquities. He once stated, “The Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans are still more alive for me than live people, other painters.... I am a link in the long chain with the past.”

It follows that Clemente harnesses historical precedents to convey his contemporary reflections—as seen in his new work in fresco. The artist’s engagement with this ancient medium is informed by his early life in his native Naples, where decorative Greco-Roman and Italian wall paintings appeared throughout the city’s architecture and in the nearby fabled ruins of Pompeii.

Utilizing four traditional fresco pigments— terre verte, ochre, sienna, and umber— Clemente renders portraits that explore self and longing. “The Clemente subject is prototypically the self; the divided self, the twinned self, the self caught in the very instant of a shift in identity or a shift in perception or perspective,” Henry Geldzahler observed. A series of tonal earth-green self-portraits find Clemente considering his identity—both as an artist and a human being, posed with a series of historical, transcultural masks. In other paintings, a horse subsumes the composition, hosting riders that further delve into explorations of personhood; “All horses are Trojan horses,” the artist has quipped with a smile. Elsewhere, vibrant multicolored frescoes feature expressions of eros: nectar drips from a honeycomb heart into open mouths; figures make love amidst lotus petals; and a nymphic Daphne resists Apollo, seen through the gap of a keyhole.

For Clemente, the act of being represents a powerful subject, a malleable and transformative state through which critical questions can be pursued. Signifying fluidity, watercolor has long functioned for Clemente as an important means to stage these explorations. He has said, “The goal of my work is to remind the viewer of the necessity to be fluid, to be in a constant state of transformation.” Beginning in the 1970s, Clemente worked in small-format watercolor, which suited his nomadic lifestyle and travels in India. In more recent years, Clemente has embarked on large-scale watercolor paintings, first with his series A History of the Heart in Three Rainbows (2009). In the exhibition at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, the watercolors on view will measure two and three meters horizontally, vividly conveying the artist’s meditations on selfhood through veils and bleeds of aqueous color.

Created during the warm and lush summer months, Clemente’s representations in oil of amorous love and the erotic impulse are intimate yet universal, addressing physical and emotional connection. His earthen, pared-down palette emphasizes metallic hues of gold and silver, while also referencing the pictorial traditions of the Italian trecento and Renaissance—the dry grays of Giotto and the cool greens of Fra Angelico. The paintings are populated with figurative iconography, including that of angels, and resonant themes of spirituality and sexuality. In Scissors (2024), an angel is nestled in the close embrace of another who has clipped their wings. Net (2024) presents intertwined forms tumbling with gravity in webbed suspension, while Cloud (2024) reveals two figures kissing, uplifted in the composition by an expansive, white tulle skirt. With Summer Love in the Fall, Clemente renders luminous visions that reflect on the bodily quality of desire and desire’s promise of transcendence.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
For more than six decades, Francesco Clemente has forged a singular career that seeks intercultural resonance, addressing the philosophical dualities of mind and body, freedom and constraint, and part and whole. In paintings, prints, frescoes, photography, book editions, and installations, he nurtures a signature poetic intensity, using metaphor and symbolism to consider the nature of the self. Dividing his time between New York, Chennai (formerly Madras) and Varanasi, India, Clemente is inspired by the Tantra traditions of India and Tibet, Beat poetry, the ritualism of Joseph Beuys, and Greco-Roman art. His frequently collaborative practice has been linked to the Italian Transavanguardia group of the late 1970s as well as New York’s concurrent neo-expressionism. Clemente frequently turns to portraiture and has painted, among others, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Toni Morrison, and Jasper Johns.

Born in Naples, Italy, in 1952, Clemente studied architecture at the Sapienza University of Rome. Following his participation in the 1980 Venice Biennale, he was critically lauded as a leader of the “return to figuration.” In 1981, with his wife Alba, he relocated to downtown Manhattan, where he collaborated with such figures as Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, and Rene Ricard. He founded the imprint Hanuman Books with Raymond Foye in 1986, and in 1998, he created the portraits that were featured in Alfonso Cuarón’s film Great Expectations. Since he was nineteen, the artist has spent significant time in India, studying Sanskrit, literature, and collaborating with local artisans.

In 2002, Clemente was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Major retrospectives of the artist’s work have been organized by the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota (1985–87), which traveled to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Dallas Museum of Art; University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Philadelphia Museum of Art (1990), traveling to the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Royal Academy of Arts, London, among other venues; Centre Pompidou, Paris (1994); Sezon Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (1994); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1999) that traveled to Guggenheim Bilbao and the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2011), among others; and the Rubin Museum of Art, New York (2014). Clemente’s work is featured in prominent museum collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Miami Art Museum; Kunstmuseum Basel; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, New York.