Lot Essay
Since the late 1970's, Francesco Clemente has favored working in series which he calls "collections". These collections are an essential aspect of the artist's oeuvre and a product of his "obsession to create as complete a panorama as possible." (D.W. Druick, "Francesco Clemente's 'Celtic Bestiary', Affinities and Intuitions: The Gerald S. Elliott Collection of Contemporary Art, Chicago 1990, p. 197). In 1989 Gerald Elliott commissioned Clemente to create a suite of five paintings. The following year, Clemente completed The Vowels (A E I O U).
Highly characteristic in Clemente's art is his use of psycho-sexual imagery to depict fundamental human/animal instincts. In The Vowels (A E I O U), he confronts us with our most basic urges, desires, and fears. These are painfully personal images. Plumbed from the artist's subconscious, they are rendered with mysterious layers of paint and meaning. They are edgy dreamscapes, but familiar, and we do not recoil. The jewel-like quality and rhythmic patterns of the surfaces are mesmerizing. Part of their magic is that the provocative imagery remains arcane. As Henry Geldzahler stated in his catalogue essay for the exhibition of these paintings in 1989:
Although many people and some art critics seem to feel the need to 'solve' Francesco Clemente's multivalent pictures, there is nothing so specific as a solution in his intellect or understanding. He does not propose to posit another reality, parallel to ours and just as consistent. Nor does he deal in exact transciptions of an objective reality no matter how insubstantial or ephemeral. His subjects and meaning arise in his fancy; they are figments of his reverie. There is, of course, an inner consistency to the oeuvre of any great artist; the dreams and reveries flow gently out of the experience and character, the consciousness and censors that are uniquely his (H. Geldzahler, Francesco Clemente, Bridgehampton 1989, n.p.).
Highly characteristic in Clemente's art is his use of psycho-sexual imagery to depict fundamental human/animal instincts. In The Vowels (A E I O U), he confronts us with our most basic urges, desires, and fears. These are painfully personal images. Plumbed from the artist's subconscious, they are rendered with mysterious layers of paint and meaning. They are edgy dreamscapes, but familiar, and we do not recoil. The jewel-like quality and rhythmic patterns of the surfaces are mesmerizing. Part of their magic is that the provocative imagery remains arcane. As Henry Geldzahler stated in his catalogue essay for the exhibition of these paintings in 1989:
Although many people and some art critics seem to feel the need to 'solve' Francesco Clemente's multivalent pictures, there is nothing so specific as a solution in his intellect or understanding. He does not propose to posit another reality, parallel to ours and just as consistent. Nor does he deal in exact transciptions of an objective reality no matter how insubstantial or ephemeral. His subjects and meaning arise in his fancy; they are figments of his reverie. There is, of course, an inner consistency to the oeuvre of any great artist; the dreams and reveries flow gently out of the experience and character, the consciousness and censors that are uniquely his (H. Geldzahler, Francesco Clemente, Bridgehampton 1989, n.p.).