The Brooklyn Rail

Balance: between form and formlessness, the personal and the universal, the temporal and the eternal. Francesco Clemente brings together large-scale watercolors, frescoes, and oil paintings in his current exhibition, continuing his long standing engagement with such tensions. Here, as in the artist’s previous six decades of work, the human figure predominates, loosely rendered, while the artist offers an introspective meditation on the impermanence of both art and life. At the heart of the exhibition is Clemente’s careful use of material, his constant negotiation with artistic traditions, and his commitment to pushing the boundaries of what painting—especially the act of painting itself—can signify in a constantly evolving contemporary context. In this case, context is hand in hand with the work itself, all of which was made this past summer.

Peacock (2024), which opens the exhibition, is an oversized watercolor dotted with near-life-sized peacock tail-feather heads, their plumes—stained in hues of green, blue, and gold—emanating from a human bust. Peachy sunset tones bleed across the sheet behind them, spreading outward from its creamy center as if having originated from a single, vast drop of water. Over the murky expanse each feather resembles a thumb print, as if from a giant (possibly the giant depicted), with their vivid repetitions of color and shape defying media-specific expectations of formlessness.

The dynamic between control and accident that Clemente achieves through watercolor is not only technical but philosophical, embodying his long-standing interest in the relationship between material constraints and artistic expression. Watercolor, by nature, is an unforgiving medium that demands immediacy, with the artist working quickly and manipulating a composition in one sitting.

Clemente’s exploration of urgency across this most recent body of work allows for a nuanced conversation about the limits of artistic practice and the ways in which different forms push the boundaries of painting itself. A striking example of this can be found in Brush (2024), a frescoed self-portrait that embodies Clemente’s engagement with both his own likeness and art history, near and far. Here Clemente’s figure appears to paint itself, the artist’s left hand outstretched, his brush poised to touch the nose of his own painted image. The positioning of the painter’s arm calls to mind Michelangelo’s iconic The Creation of Adam (1512), where God reaches out to impart Adam with the spark of life. In this case, however, the gesture is not divine but self-reflective, a moment of intimate connection between the artist and his own creation.

Painting is both a physical and metaphysical gesture in Brush, through which Clemente investigates the limits of representation and the idea of the artist as both creator and created. This is amplified by the approach itself, with fresco being a form traditionally linked to Italian religious and moral instruction, but here instead used as a vehicle for personal reflection. Clemente positions himself within the broader canon of Italian painting, yet his work is unmistakably contemporary, more concerned with self-portraiture and the ever-shifting nature of the Self than with moral or religious teachings. The deliberate tension between reverence for fresco as a technique—with its roots in moral and architectural space—and Clemente’s subversion of that tradition in his own personal quest for meaning.

Clemente’s return to fresco more broadly, having employed it since the 1970s, speaks to his ongoing investigation of the limits of painting in an era of new media (though this reviewer would suggest our current predicament is, rather than the post-painting of late-century, post-post-painting). At times when many contemporary artists moved away from painting in favor of more conceptual or multimedia practices, Clemente has continued to position himself on the forefront of what may now be considered “trad,” continuing to query whether art may serve the world best when unconcerned about its own status quo. Here, his engagement with fresco allows him to explore painting not just as a representational act, but as a physically embodied, temporally grounded process—one that is connected to the architecture of a space, the passage of time, and the decay of materials. Brush represents a reflection on the impermanence of identity and the ways in which we, as viewers and makers, exist within and beyond the boundaries of the self.

In Brush the artist engages self-referentially, almost humorously, with his own identity; not merely repeating art history but inhabiting it in order to reflect on his role in the larger narrative of painting. Other frescoes in the present exhibition seem to do the same; through a series of four works depicting horses and their riders, viewers may be surprised to find a staid genre of European painting revived: the rider in Star (2024) is seemingly bareback while engaging in coitus, their face “starred” out in a gesture of decorum misdirected. The horse in Mask (2024) dons the rider’s face as a mask, and the rider, the horse’s. In Sunflower (2024), there is no rider: the horse is Trojan, delivering a sunflower growing through its core.

The chapter of Clemente’s practice represented here finds the artist’s perspective surprisingly fresh. His voice, if engaged critically with a bygone era, lingers determinedly in every work exhibited.