Francesco Clemente - Untitled

The work draws on an Informal aesthetic language. The devastation wrought by World War II left a profound mark on Western civilization, which in the visual arts also resulted in an inability to communicate. For some artists, this challenge led to a complete rejection of any visual language, resulting in the birth of Informal Art. The various Informal movements are certainly connected to American Abstract Expressionism, especially with regard to the gestural component, but they go further in their rejection of any figurative element, even geometric. Their research focuses instead on the material from which their works are composed.

Francesco Clemente's pictorial production typically blends figurative elements with mysterious, symbolic ones. In this work, however, the symbolic component completely prevails, definitively characterizing the work with the incommunicability typical of Informal art. Even in terms of execution, the artist abandons his stylized figurative style to adopt a decidedly gestural, abstract-expressionist approach. Thus, the hermetic nature of this representation prevails, transfiguring the painter's perception into a system of signs that leaves the viewer with no reference points. Also of interest is the use of denim as a support, which reflects a desire to transcend traditional pictorial media to experiment with materials that have their own tactile consistency, typical of Arte Povera and the poetics of the object in general.

Francesco Clemente was born in Naples in 1952. After studying architecture in Rome and spending extended periods in India during the 1970s, Clemente established himself as a member of the Transavanguardia, or Neo-Expressionist, artistic movement with the exhibition "Aperto '80," curated by Harald Szeemann and Achille Bonito Oliva for the 39th Venice Biennale. The following year, he moved to New York, where he came into contact with the avant-garde art scene and met Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. During this period, he experimented with figuration through painting and drawing, constant media in his artistic practice, focusing on the human figure, the body, and the self-portrait, central subjects in the artist's entire oeuvre.

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