Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, Francesco Clemente constantly eludes us. This Italian artist, born in Naples in 1952, is a walking enigma that defies any attempt at easy classification. And that’s a good thing. For several decades, he has navigated between continents, traditions, and mediums with disconcerting fluidity, creating art that questions the limits of our consciousness and the boundaries of our imagination.
An intellectual nomad par excellence, Clemente has transcended the reductive labels of the “Transavanguardia” movement with which he is often associated. His work goes beyond mere aesthetic considerations to plunge us into a much more ambiguous territory, that of perpetual metamorphosis, fluid identity, and eroticism as a path to knowledge.
What strikes immediately is the visceral intensity of his self-portraits. Take his “Self-Portrait with a Hole in the Head” (1981), a work that does not merely show us a face, but exposes a metaphysical wound, an opening towards a beyond of ordinary consciousness. Clemente depicts himself with disarming frankness, his body becoming a battlefield where contradictory forces clash. His orifices, mouth, eyes, nostrils, are not merely anatomical characteristics, but passages between worlds, zones of transition between interior and exterior.
If we truly want to understand Clemente’s singularity, we must situate him at the crossroads of two essential intellectual traditions: Jungian psychoanalysis and tantric philosophy. The former provides a key to decoding his recurrent personal symbols; the latter illuminates his conception of the body as a microcosm.
Carl Jung, this giant of psychoanalysis too often relegated to Freud’s shadow, bequeathed to us the essential concept of the collective unconscious, populated by universal archetypes that transcend cultures and eras [1]. Clemente draws abundantly from this symbolic reservoir common to humanity. His hybrid figures, part human and part animal, his bodily metamorphoses, his images of sexual union are not mere surrealist fantasies, but manifestations of archetypes deeply anchored in our collective psyche.
“The collective unconscious is the part of the psyche which retains and transmits the common psychological heritage of humanity,” wrote Jung in “The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious” [2]. This is precisely the dimension that Clemente explores when he presents us with oneiric scenes where the boundaries between human, animal, and divine blur. In his series “The Fourteen Stations” (1981-82), first exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, Clemente reinterprets the Christian Stations of the Cross through a personal prism where suffering and transcendence meet in a hallucinatory vision of the human body as a site of spiritual transformation.
But Clemente is not merely an illustrator of Jungian archetypes. His approach is much more embodied, more carnal. This is where tantric philosophy comes in, with its vision of the body as a vehicle for knowledge and liberation. After his first trips to India in the 1970s, Clemente was profoundly influenced by the spiritual traditions of the subcontinent. At the library of the Theosophical Society in Madras, which he frequented assiduously in 1976 and 1977, he studied tantric texts that consider the body not as an obstacle to spirituality, but as its privileged instrument.
The tantric vision perceives the human body as a microcosm reflecting the entire universe. As the Indologist Alain Daniélou explains, “in the tantric conception, the human body is a summary of the universe. All cosmic principles are represented there” [3]. This correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm imbues Clemente’s work, particularly in his self-portraits where his body becomes the theater of a personal cosmogony.
Consider his famous frescoes, realized using ancient techniques. In “Priapea” (1980), exhibited at the Guggenheim, his body is literally dismembered by chubby putti in a scene that evokes both mystical ecstasy and agony. It is no coincidence that Clemente chose fresco as his medium, a technique which, as he himself says, is “the most luminous of all” because the pigment is mixed only with water, thus preserving the absolute purity of the color. This quest for purity and luminosity in the pictorial matter echoes the spiritual quest that animates his work.
But be careful, I do not want to make you believe that Clemente is a disembodied mystic, floating above earthly realities. No, the strength of his art lies precisely in the tension between spiritual aspiration and carnal anchoring, between transcendence and immanence. His eroticism is never gratuitous; it is charged with metaphysical meanings. As Georges Bataille writes in “Eroticism”, “eroticism is the approval of life even in death” [4]. This definition applies perfectly to Clemente’s work where sexuality is constantly intertwined with questions of identity, dissolution, and rebirth.
Literature has also nourished Clemente’s imagination, notably through his collaboration with the Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg. Their meeting in New York in the early 1980s gave birth to several projects, including the illustration of the poem “White Shroud”. Ginsberg’s universe, with its fusion of Eastern spirituality and American visceral energy, finds a natural echo in Clemente’s art. Both seek to transcend the easy oppositions between East and West, between sacred and profane.
Ginsberg, in his famous poem “Howl”, denounced a mechanized American society that crushes the most sensitive spirits: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked…” [5]. This critique of mechanization and dehumanization resonates deeply with Clemente’s work, which constantly seeks to re-enchant the world through a lush imagination and unbridled sensuality.
This shared vision of an art that refuses Western materialism without falling into cheap orientalism is at the heart of Clemente’s artistic enterprise. His nomadism is not a pose, but an inner necessity, a way to resist reductive categories and fixed identities. As he declared in an interview: “If history can lead to a dead end, then perhaps geography can be the territory of my work.”
Look at his watercolors from the series “No Mud, No Lotus” (2013-2014). These works, created after stays in Brazil, blend references to the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé with Indian motifs and reminiscences of Italian Renaissance painting. Clemente does not merely juxtapose these traditions; he makes them dialogue, creating a new symbolic space that transcends their apparent differences.
This fundamentally distinguishes Clemente from the neo-expressionists with whom he has often been grouped. Unlike an Anselm Kiefer, haunted by German history, or a Julian Schnabel, obsessed with his own personal mythology, Clemente seeks to escape historical and cultural determinisms. His art is not a reaction to the conceptual art of the 1970s, as some superficial critics suggest, but an attempt to create a visual language that draws its strength from the world’s pictorial traditions without being imprisoned by any.
This freedom is also manifested in his technique. Clemente masters a wide range of media: oil on canvas, pastel, watercolor, fresco, drawing… This technical diversity is not gratuitous; it corresponds to different states of consciousness, different modalities of being in the world. Watercolor, with its transparency and fluidity, is perfectly suited to ephemeral and changing visions. Fresco, with its mineral solidity, embodies a longer, more monumental temporality. Oil, with its sensory richness, allows exploration of the depths of flesh and desire.
Do not be mistaken: Clemente is not a technical virtuoso in the traditional sense. His drawing may seem clumsy, his anatomical proportions approximate, his compositions sometimes unbalanced. But these apparent imperfections are deliberate; they are part of a strategy aimed at short-circuiting our perceptual habits, at making us see the world with a fresh, unconventional gaze.
The art historian Donald Kuspit spoke of Clemente’s “beating lubricity”. The expression is lovely but misleading. For there is nothing beatific in Clemente’s art; on the contrary, it is traversed by a fundamental unease, a permanent questioning of the nature of identity and consciousness. The eroticism that permeates his work is not a naive celebration of sensuality, but an exploration of the liminal zones where the self dissolves into the other, where the boundaries between interior and exterior blur.
This dissolution of the self, Clemente expresses it masterfully in his double self-portraits, where he represents himself in conversation, confrontation, or communion with himself. These works are not mere narcissistic games; they stage the fundamental multiplicity of our being, what the philosopher Georges Gusdorf called “the discovery of oneself as other than oneself” [5].
Clemente’s art is profoundly contemporary in its approach to questions of identity, gender, and transculturalism. Long before these themes became commonplaces of artistic discourse, Clemente was already exploring the fluidity of sexual and cultural identities. His hermaphroditic figures, his metamorphic bodies, his respectful appropriation of non-Western traditions testify to a sensitivity that transcends reductive cleavages.
But do not be mistaken: Clemente is not a “politically correct” artist in the contemporary sense of the term. His art cannot be reduced to slogans or ideological postures. It is too complex, too ambiguous, too elusive for that. It confronts us with our contradictions, our unavowed desires, our ancestral fears. It does not offer us easy solutions, but invites us to embrace the complexity of our human condition.
The work of Francesco Clemente reminds us that art is not merely aesthetic entertainment, but a form of knowledge, a knowledge that passes through the body, the senses, the imagination. A knowledge that cannot be confined within rigid categories, but that flourishes in the interstices, in the zones of passage, in the liminal spaces where opposites meet and mutually transform.
Perhaps this is where the secret of the lasting fascination exerted by Clemente’s art lies: in its ability to create images that resist definitive interpretation, that constantly invite us to renew our gaze and our thought. Images that, as Italo Calvino wrote about literature, “allow us to continue living in uncertainty, which means being aware of all open possibilities.”
- Jung, Carl Gustav. “The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious”, Éditions Albin Michel, 1986.
- Jung, Carl Gustav. “Psychology and Alchemy”, Éditions Buchet/Chastel, 1970.
- Daniélou, Alain. “Shiva and Dionysus”, Éditions Fayard, 1979.
- Bataille, Georges. “Eroticism”, Éditions de Minuit, 1957.
- Ginsberg, Allen. “Howl and Other Poems”, City Lights Books, 1956.
