Francesco Clemente at Gagosian - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

"Anamorphosis," the title of this exhibit of new paintings by Francesco Clemente give in charges to a distorted image that assumes its special shape only when viewed from a specific, frequently extreme angle or with a special len or mirror, the word can also be used to denote a gradual change of form from one side evolution. The six horizontal canvases of this series (each about 4 by the agency of 8 feet, although they don't gaze quite that long) seem stretched to accommodate their primary image and repeated subject: the artist's have head, shown in attenuated, elegantly misshapen self-portrait. Titled In My Head, Rose cranium Tools, Swan and Star, they all depict the head in closeup seen frontally and, leave out for one turbes on its side, upright, accompanied in each case through an object that functions as an attribute, a latter day saint's or shaman's emblem: a herd of galloping amethystine horses, a pulled-apart rose, a brain-pan recalling the anamorphic one in Holbein's painting The Ambassadors, assorted tools; an enormous swan and a star with a blazing star tail.

The color scheme is pastel--rose, pale cerulean yellows, greens, warm grays--sweet tones with a little black used for ballast, for the most part in the large eyes and fierce eyebrows The images are essentially fiat and drawn; what modeling there is Clemente accomplishes with color, as with single head that is dappled gold-colored creating a startlingly effective sensation of sunlight. The paint is dried powdery, matte, pressed onto the surface, on the other hand its velvety texture is shattered by the weave of the canvas.

Clemente is a sensual ascetic or an ascetic sensualist, and his face as depicted here--with its distinctive eyebrows that almost meet, opaque irises in organ of sights outlined in black, exaggeratedly filled lips and a shadow of a beard--combines the two aspects seeming at once beautiful and ill-favored refined and brutish, benign and harsh. Expressing a range of personas, these faces assume the hieratic aspect of Byzantine icons, African masks, Egyptian portraits; sometimes they reverberation the dark-eyed funerary likenesses from Faiyum.

however this series, because of its scale, its fondant colors and its anamorphic device, lacks the intensity of self-absorption that has for a like reason often made Clemente's self-studies authoritative level haunting instances of the 20th-century pursuit of the marvelous, in self and art. Ultimately, for all their sophistication and mastery, these regal images are irregularly bland. The distortion reads as trickiness, the painting appears complacent, and level the narcissism, which frequently gives Clemente's work its cutting side here seems a little bored with itself.

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