The Brooklyn Rail

The twelve works that make up Travel Diary document Francesco Clemente’s journey through metaphysical space. The exhibition develops a parallel with alchemy, a practice which, although superficially involving the transmutation of lead into gold, truly aims at the metamorphosis of the alchemist themself into an angelic spirit. Clemente’s icons similarly document his own transformation into an artist and, ultimately, into art.

Even the number of pieces included in the show has mystical connotations. The twelve hours on the clock face, the twelve months in a year, the twelve signs of the zodiac: these are concerned with the passage of time, the circularity of the passing seasons, and human mortality—all transcended when the mortal artist transforms into art. It is no coincidence that the first piece to greet the visitor is Birthday Self-Portrait (2001), a 163 by 171-inch mixed media work on denim. Here Clemente peers out at us from the right, while all the years of his life, beginning in 1952, hover like a cluster of flowers on our left. Clemente depicts himself breathing out his life, both acknowledging his mortality and escaping it through art, which he represents with the thumb that accompanies the self-image. The wide chronological range of the works included at Vito Schnabel—the earliest from 1998 and the latest from 2025—chronicles both the passage of time and the creative process that serves as an antidote to mortality.

To the left of the self-portrait hangs The Artificial Princess (2012), slightly more modest in size at 118 by 79 inches, a mixed media composition on canvas. The artificial princess—artificial because once again she makes herself into art—appears in Ronald Firbank’s 1934 novel of the same name. All of Firbank’s characters long to become works of art, and his princess, who wears gowns “nearly always indiscreet,” is no exception. Firbanks writes, “To-day, the wicked thing wore masses of lace with twists of riband termed ‘Inspirations’ and no particular sleeves; her slender arms like the stem of flowers fainting away to the pointed finger-tips that seemed to evaporate and lose themselves in æther.” Sure enough, Clemente’s version of Firbank’s character, rendered abstract in hues that recall Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’s muted frescoes, is an isosceles triangle melancholically covering her face with her arm while wearing a pink dress dotted with real buttons. Art triumphs over life, but the melancholy consciousness of the omnipresence of death inevitably permeates the work.

Art as utopia appears in the pigment on canvas My Tree House (2015–16), measuring 93 by 78 inches. Clemente’s treehouse corresponds to the hanged man in the tarot deck: neither in heaven nor on earth but suspended between them. The treehouse, an image of the dreamer, exists in isolation like the saint who withdraws to the desert to purify their soul. Only by separating themself from contingency and distraction can the artist focus on creation. Just as the finished work of art itself escapes time, the artist too must enter an interior castle. The tree supporting the house has its roots in the ground but seeks to grow upward, away from the lower world and into the realm of purity. As it grows, the tree house reaches higher and higher. The white isosceles triangle flying like a flag next to Clemente’s house confirms the structure as the site of artistic creation: a source of unity, order, and purity.

More specific and more complex in its relation to artistic metamorphosis is Trungpa (2012), a 91-by-92-inch mixed media work on canvas. The celebrated Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (1939–87) used the wheel, Clemente’s subject here, as a double symbol, representative of both samsara—the endless cycle of birth and death—and a means to achieve enlightenment. Enlightenment here is the escape from ego, the realization that being an artist means being part of a great tradition. At the center of Clemente’s golden wheel are a bird and a skull: the bird a symbol of spiritual elevation, and the skull perhaps referring to the inescapable “death” we all experience as slaves to contingency.

The earliest work in the show, Dormiveglia I (1998), a 128-by-64-inch oil on canvas, shows a mutilated female figure standing on one leg, her right arm draped over her head. Both her left arm and her left leg have been amputated. Clemente returns to the hanged man from the tarot deck, suspended (like the treehouse) between worlds, and therefore in a space of enlightenment, combining it with the idea of martyrdom, the self-sacrifice necessary to achieve illumination. Clemente’s title refers to a moment when we are neither awake nor asleep, a time when we may access our dreams—another allusion to the importance of abandoning earthly things in the search for artistic immortality and a fitting capstone to Travel Diary, a great exercise in spiritual painting.