Francesco Clemente "Nostalgia | Utopia"
Mary Boone Gallery (Chelsea)
This event has ended.
Clemente continues his masterful interlacing of disparate images, materials, and cultures. The works run autonomously through Colonial Baroque, Afro-Brazilian, Indian, and urban American iconography. Deftly painted imagined scenes and figures co-exist with real sculptural objects affixed to the canvas surface. Each painting exists outside of specific reference to place or time.
Although individual motifs of Clemente's paintings can be linked to influences of his peripatetic lifestyle and spiritual exploration, the precise reading of any work remains elusive. In one pair of correlated paintings, an African mask at the center of a radiant sunflower sheds a string of pearl tears; then a wooden wheel with small birds corralled among its spokes turns on an axis bearing a skull and artists' palette. Another painting exhibits strands of rainbow-hued barbed wire stretched across a painted quilt or tile pattern; this spectrum is reprised in a work in which brightly painted transistor radios sit in a row atop an enigmatic image comprised of quilts, ladders, crescent moons, and collaged fragments of Piranesi prints. Each element - mysterious and rich in associations - is free to form new and surprising relationships.
Also included in the exhibition is a new series of eighteen gouache and sanguine drawings.
These intimate works function as a sourcebook of ideas expanded upon in the paintings.
Media
Schedule
from May 05, 2012 to June 30, 2012
Opening Reception on 2012-05-05 from 17:00 to 19:00