-Roland Barthes
There is a tradition of speech within Christianity known as the apophatic. One of the foremost features of this tradition, and the reason it so frequently makes the orthodox suspicious, is the unusual syntax it employs. Apophatic speech insists on sentences that attempt to account for the limitations of our lingual and conceptual understanding. One such sentence might read, "God is not good." The intention here is not so much to suggest, "God is bad," as to point to the inadequacy of language and the tendency to downplay God's otherness. In other words, someone speaking out of this tradition cannot call God "good" because any comprehensible conception of goodness falls short of the actuality and absoluteness of God's goodness. There, better to say "not good," if for no other reason than to remind us of these limitations in light of God's transcendence.
While this introduction may seem to be an unusual way to begin a consideration of the work of Francesco Clemente, I want to suggest a basic analog between the role of the apophatic speaker and Clemente's activity as a painter. This analog rests on the assertion that the work of both assert that there are limitations inherent to our understanding. As a result, both employ a form of negation that reinforces the ultimate subject of their interest at the expense of ready comprehension. Following this analogy one step further, Clemente's reliance on what many critics suspected as retrograde strategies for art making (painting, the handmade, the figure, iconography) dressed up in postmodern costume actually serve to clarify painting through the negational strategies he employs. Without a doubt, Clemente's work is anachronistic in its subject matter and excessive in its voluminous and hermetic use of imageries. What is less frequently noticed is that these characteristics obliquely direct our attention elsewhere.
Clemente's Self Portrait from 1980 is an excellent example of these characteristics. Any attempt to read this work as a naturalistic depiction of his physical appearance, a symbolic depiction of himself or as part of the historical genre known as portraiture is disrupted by the red blotches of paint that register across the work's surface. These blotches are haphazard and indefinite. Their only practical effect is register the surface of the painting. In doing so, they disrupt our understanding of foreground/background and figure/ground relationships by making it impossible to tell whether the painting ought to be considered as an image or a surface. In other words, the meanings and materials of this painting head in different directions.
Clemente has made several bodies of work in a variety of mediums that contain tensions similar to the ones highlighted in this portrait, making it difficult to regard his ambivalence as anything other than intentional. Such an ambivalence allows Clemente to recontextualize painting as a a dynamic material that will never wholly conform to the representational, symbolic or expressive capacities with which it has traditionally been associated. This recontextualization is supplemented by a refusal on Clemente's part to legitimize his work through appeals to art history, an overarching conceptual concern, modern technology or virtuosity. These many refusals enact an ongoing withholding that enables him to pseudo-naively assume painting. He begins painting at the point where such preoccupations no longer account for the visible in painting and where most people, including artists, are not quite sure what does. Painting's ongoing existential anxieties, now running over a century, make this posture viable (and valuable), reminding us that language has no simple rapport with meaning.
(This post is adapted from Chapter 2 of my master's thesis completed in 2008.)
There is a tradition of speech within Christianity known as the apophatic. One of the foremost features of this tradition, and the reason it so frequently makes the orthodox suspicious, is the unusual syntax it employs. Apophatic speech insists on sentences that attempt to account for the limitations of our lingual and conceptual understanding. One such sentence might read, "God is not good." The intention here is not so much to suggest, "God is bad," as to point to the inadequacy of language and the tendency to downplay God's otherness. In other words, someone speaking out of this tradition cannot call God "good" because any comprehensible conception of goodness falls short of the actuality and absoluteness of God's goodness. There, better to say "not good," if for no other reason than to remind us of these limitations in light of God's transcendence.
While this introduction may seem to be an unusual way to begin a consideration of the work of Francesco Clemente, I want to suggest a basic analog between the role of the apophatic speaker and Clemente's activity as a painter. This analog rests on the assertion that the work of both assert that there are limitations inherent to our understanding. As a result, both employ a form of negation that reinforces the ultimate subject of their interest at the expense of ready comprehension. Following this analogy one step further, Clemente's reliance on what many critics suspected as retrograde strategies for art making (painting, the handmade, the figure, iconography) dressed up in postmodern costume actually serve to clarify painting through the negational strategies he employs. Without a doubt, Clemente's work is anachronistic in its subject matter and excessive in its voluminous and hermetic use of imageries. What is less frequently noticed is that these characteristics obliquely direct our attention elsewhere.
Clemente's Self Portrait from 1980 is an excellent example of these characteristics. Any attempt to read this work as a naturalistic depiction of his physical appearance, a symbolic depiction of himself or as part of the historical genre known as portraiture is disrupted by the red blotches of paint that register across the work's surface. These blotches are haphazard and indefinite. Their only practical effect is register the surface of the painting. In doing so, they disrupt our understanding of foreground/background and figure/ground relationships by making it impossible to tell whether the painting ought to be considered as an image or a surface. In other words, the meanings and materials of this painting head in different directions.
Clemente has made several bodies of work in a variety of mediums that contain tensions similar to the ones highlighted in this portrait, making it difficult to regard his ambivalence as anything other than intentional. Such an ambivalence allows Clemente to recontextualize painting as a a dynamic material that will never wholly conform to the representational, symbolic or expressive capacities with which it has traditionally been associated. This recontextualization is supplemented by a refusal on Clemente's part to legitimize his work through appeals to art history, an overarching conceptual concern, modern technology or virtuosity. These many refusals enact an ongoing withholding that enables him to pseudo-naively assume painting. He begins painting at the point where such preoccupations no longer account for the visible in painting and where most people, including artists, are not quite sure what does. Painting's ongoing existential anxieties, now running over a century, make this posture viable (and valuable), reminding us that language has no simple rapport with meaning.
(This post is adapted from Chapter 2 of my master's thesis completed in 2008.)
