Francesco Clemente

Francesco Clemente - Self-Portrait with Two Heads, 2002
oil on canvas

The Self Portrait with Two Heads that I have seen at the Paint Made Flesh exhibition looks undoubtedly provocative (and ambiguous, playing on a subtle confusion sexual identity), but it is good to compare it with another self portrait that I have found on a web site of Gagosian (Self Portrait with and without the Mask): we'll have a better understanding of Francesco Clemente's art. He takes the whole, decomposes it in parts and rearranges them to propose us some kind of unexpected statements. In this sense we could think at him as a Conceptualist. But it is more here.

Francesco Clemente - Self Portrait with and without the Mask, 2005
oil on linen

Says Rainer Crone, Clemente exploits figurative images for non-narrative purposes... (He) has something original to contribute: figure-words, as Novalis would call it, pictorial discoveries from a pre-conscious, pre-linguistic world, releasing associations in the observer through the power of their expressiveness. This pictorial means is one we are most familiar with through fairy tales, myths and dreams - meanings of possible, conceivable worlds. His pictures question a reality that only exists by approximation, and whose existence we intimate through the power of our own desires.

(Paint Made Flesh)