Authors

Gregory Corso, Robert Creeley, Lisa Dennison, Raymond Foye, Allen Ginsberg, Craig Houser, Jyotindra Jain, Gita Mehta, Francesco Pellizzi, Rene Ricard, Ettore Sottsass, and Gus Van Sant

Description

Published on the occasion of the first comprehensive retrospective of Francesco Clemente’s work, this volume is a living document that reflects the sensibility, vision, and aesthetic of an exceptional artist. Through the words of the authors, who explicate the exhibition’s themes from their own personal vantage points, a collective vision of Clemente, the artist, emerges.

One reads that “Clemente belongs to a breed of artists who seek to guard mysteries and not unravel them”; that he “has consistently worked against the notions of fixed identity that are denoted by a ‘signature’ style” (Raymond Foye). That his “ego itself is permeable and indefinite, absorbing, synthesizing, and releasing the substance of sensual and cultural experience” (Lisa Dennison). That, in delving into the common roots of painting and poetry, Clemente has collaborated with such poets as Gregory Corso, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Rene Ricard, and John Wieners. That, through Clemente’s work, “we are made newly aware of the connection between the outer surface of our skin and the inner one of our world, the world as our enveloping cave or womb” (Francesco Pellizzi). That the artist “does not perceive any inherent incongruity in his concurrent explorations of images from his own ‘dominant’ culture and from India’s ‘alternative’ one” (Jyotindra Jain). That his work “reinforces the Indian philosophical concept that to be unborn is to be in a state of blind unconsciousness, while to be born is to be conscious, to see” (Gita Mehta). That “Francesco has bumped, as an innocent, into the story of painting, into the mysteries of painting. It is as if he were crossing a wide river of purifying, special water, of special, hidden, dangerous, waves and currents, leading far into a deep orgasm, into a total physical ecstasy” (Ettore Sottsass). And that “he is consumed by sex. Sexuality. Which is beauty. He wants to paint sexuality and does” (Gus Van Sant).

Reviews

“5 stars”
--amazon.com customer reviews

“This finely wrought, lush, 500-page volume does justice to the wide-ranging oeuvre of one of the most open-minded, ambitious, and productive artists of the late 20th century. . . . Clemente's art, which lays bare his obsessions with sex, self, and spirituality and explores them with a constantly surprising range of intense color and formal invention, stands in bracing, deeply pleasurable opposition to the desiccated, design-bound, theory-driven work that has dominated so much art of the last 25 years.”
--Peggy Moorman, amazon.com

Contents