The artist Francesco Clemente has long aligned himself with lyricism. He collaborated with Allen Ginsberg and Rene Ricard in the 1980s, and has taken inspiration from Federico García Lorca. “Maybe poets express more directly a sense of sympathy for other human beings,” he once said. “Painting is a little bit more of a retreat from human beings in real life; painting is more about the extreme moments when speech doesn’t help anymore.”
Clemente has certainly painted extreme moments. His 1987 work Semen, for instance, shows the artist’s naked frame suspended in an endless silver field, his face contorted in ecstasy. So, too, might his restless cosmopolitanism be described as extreme. Born in Naples in 1952, he studied architecture in Rome, began exhibiting around the Continent in the early 70s, took a formative trip to India and established a studio practice in Chennai, then jaunted to Afghanistan with Alighiero Boetti.
