Francesco Clemente's spontaneous, impassioned way of working has risks - but he creates more hits than misses, writes Aidan Dunne, Art Critic.
With his close-cropped, receding hair and grey beard, his piercing eyes and intense, ascetic bearing, Italian artist Francesco Clemente has the air of a mystic. Although he lives in New York, is a high-flyer in the art world, and was a friend of Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe, that impression is not too far off the mark. For there is another side to Clemente, one that relates to his lifelong spiritual quest. It is this side that animates his extraordinarily charged, hyperactive work.
His paintings, pastels and watercolours are charged with a raw visionary power. Unmediated by artifice, their rough, immediate textures and handmade appearance seem almost out of place in a digital world of slick packaging and virtual reality. In fact, Clemente is against photography and film, and for the spontaneity and vitality of the human gesture on canvas or paper. The acts of drawing or painting, for him, have always been something curative, even magical, in themselves.
The word that comes up more often than any other in descriptions of his work is "eclectic", and it is eclectic, in that it draws on and combines a huge range of religious and mystical imagery from different traditions.
He was born into a privileged, aristocratic background in Naples in 1952. Although he studied architecture, he had no desire to become an architect. Like many young people in Western culture, he felt spiritually adrift and, an admirer of the Beat poets, he looked East for inspiration, travelling to India.
He spent a great deal of time in India over the years, with his wife, Alba Primiceri. India has remained central to him because, it seems fair to say, it substantially restored to him the spiritual dimension that he felt was long lost to European culture. He likes the way a sense of the sacred is present in every aspect of life in India, something simply not true of the West. But since moving in 1981 to New York, where he has worked quite happily (though he has also travelled, to India, Mexico and elsewhere), he could be vulnerable to accusations that he commodifies Eastern spiritual values for Western consumption.
Yet, such accusations would be unfair, because the evidence suggests that his involvement in both milieus has always been entirely genuine and whole-hearted.
There are many references to his stay at the estate of the Theosophical Society at Adyar, near Madras. Theosophy is famous for attracting the interest of W.B. Yeats and others with its quixotic aim of reconciling Western science - in the event, more Western occultism - and Eastern mysticism. But Clemente is not a theosophist and shows no signs of being susceptible to the more fanciful aspects of the society's ideas and activities. He is notably measured and judicious in any recorded statements about his own beliefs, but gives the impression of being closer to Van Morrison's Krishnamurti-like No Guru, No Method, No Teacher than to any external, institutional authority.
The advent of the Transavantgarde (the neo-expressionism movement in Italy) in the late 1970s was fortuitous for Clemente, and brought him to New York. Against all expectations, an art world dominated by austere minimalism and high-minded conceptualism suddenly embraced the abandoned exuberance of figurative, expressionist painting.
Internationally, Clemente was lumped together with two compatriots, Sandro Chia and Enzo Cucchi, as the Three Cs. They were, however, all significantly different artists and, for whatever reason, Clemente has proved to have the most staying power.
While as an artist he emerged from this defining moment of contemporary art history, when both the authority of a reductive formalism and the dream of a grand, all-encompassing style gave way to the fractured, pluralist landscape of post-modernity, he is in many respects a curiously old-fashioned artist. He conforms to the idea of the romantic visionary, with a contemporary, Beuysian twist: the artist as showman and shaman, priest and magician. Think Bono with a paint brush, and the talent to use it. In his work, it is as if he is a possessed, spiritualised being, a dispenser of inspired images.
While he draws on the imagery and narratives of several diverse religious systems, his is a synthesising vision. Like many visionaries before him, he appropriates what takes his fancy to develop a personal iconography, a personal system of spiritual meaning - his own mythology - though one can never be sure of its exact meaning. There is an underlying aspiration to find a common ground here, to formulate a set of symbols that will express and embody, and allow the communication of, what might be described as universal aspects of human experience or even, to push the boat out a little further, universal spiritual truths.
Clemente's imagery is ordinary enough to be readily comprehensible, at least superficially. Apart from emblematic patterns including spirals and interwoven loops, in a simplified ideographic style he habitually depicts such things as male and female genitalia, skulls, heads and hearts, whole figures, trees, flowers, sun, moon and stars, fruit, birds, snakes and ladders and boats. Many of these things are metamorphically interrelated and all are amenable to flexible symbolic interpretation in the manner of iconographic schemes such as the Tarot (he uses cards as a symbol), or the signs of the zodiac, or Buddhist tantric art.
Clemente's personal iconography refers to such universals as birth, pain, ecstasy, love, sex, death, regeneration, destiny, awe.
He went through a long period - let's call it his Freudian period - of feverishly eroticising just about everything. He likes conflating the categories of male and female, blending phallic and vulval motifs in various ways, including many androgynous self-portraits. He is particularly fond of certain images, including hearts pierced by arrows: love and loss.
Can he offer real insights into common areas of experience in a striking visual way? A way that is perhaps not readily paraphrasable, or at any rate not remotely as aesthetically satisfying. Clemente can come up with striking images, as in Silver and Stone, in which silver tears falling from wide eyes metamorphose into stones on the ground. . Yet, perhaps an abiding element of mystery is as important as any interpretation. Looking at the work, one would say that Clemente likes and is drawn to arcana, to secret knowledge, to those who promise access to the mystical underpinnings of physical reality.
While one strand of post-modernism might regard the plurality of the world from a relativist perspective, as having no unifying ground of reality, no truth apart from that constructed within any one of multiple cultural frameworks of meaning, allowing us only the ironic play of signifiers; that is not what is going on in Clemente's work. He is clearly not engaged in an ironic exploration of comparative religion.
Rather the implication is that systems of belief express a common, underlying spiritual impulse, which is close to the argument advanced by the historian of religion Mircea Eliade, cited by Enrique Juncosa, the Irish Museum of Modern Art director, in his catalogue essay on Clemente.
Eliade's contention is that the idea of the sacred is intrinsic to human culture, though manifested in various forms.
It is as if Clemente's paintings arrive if not quite fully formed, then in single bursts of inspiration and execution, as though they are efforts to capture fleeting, dreamlike visions. That is to say, what we see is not something worked through, arrived at: it's there, a given. "It always looks hasty," as Robert Hughes wrote in 1985, and all these years later Clemente is still a man in a hurry.
His spontaneous, impassioned way of working has risks, notably the risk of the execution not being up to the level of the inspiration. And that certainly happens. Exceptionally prolific, he is a hit-and-miss artist. But his work never depends on conventional strengths or technical skills. One looks for visual cogency and rough-hewn beauty, for a striking formulation of the elements of a painterly language. And on those terms, he delivers more hits than misses.
Francesco Clemente: New Works runs at IMMA from Wednesday, February 4th until April 25th. Tel: 01-6129900. www.modernart.ie