In this conversation, held at the Triennale Milano as part of the “Artist Talks” series co-presented by Fondation Beyeler and ۶Ƶ, Italian artist Francesco Clemente speaks openly with Hans Ulrich-Obrist, Artistic Director of The Serpentine, about his colorful life and how he honed his diverse artistic craft.

“When I started imagining myself as an artist, I imagined that I would not follow a straight line, a linear path from one point to another, but that I would expand like a star in a radial way…” With an academic background in literature and architecture, Clemente begins the talk by reflecting on his early visions for his future creative career.

At just 19-years old, the artist escaped the complex political climate in Italy to travel to India. “It was a revelation in the sense that India, for me, appeared as an alternative contemporaneity…In India there was still the hope of another narrative” he says. While discussing his personal definition of art, the artist added “art is the desire to take off my shoes, empty my pockets, and walk away…” - a feeling that he often had in India.

At the time of his return to Italy and the Western contemporary art scene, “painting was completely discredited, somehow for a moment.” Clemente set out to challenge that trend, first by exhibiting photographs of his drawings and then by embracing drawing and painting altogether, a move that, initially, confused even his early mentor, Alighiero Boetti.

Clemente met Boetti, alongside Luigi Ontani, in the Roman art scene. As non-local artists, the trio were met with friction and ended up forming an artistic alliance of sorts. “…by going against us they pushed us into solidarity with each other,” he notes. Clemente was also deeply inspired by Boetti’s way of thinking, and admired Ontani’s performative self-portraits, which moved him to “imagine [himself] more as a performer than a painter.”

In the early 1980s Clemente moved to New York. It was here that he “really began to paint” says Hans Ulrich-Obrist. The artist responded: “In New York I heard the voice of New Amsterdam, of De Kooning's, of Flemish painting. And suddenly I felt empowered to smell the scent of oil painting, although until then, it had not interested me at all.”

A master of many crafts, the artist goes on to reflect on his passion for language and poetry and explores some of his most iconic collaborations over the years in which he lived between Chennai (formerly known as Madras) and New York. He published his Hanuman Books, a series of 51 hand -bound and -sewn tiny volumes, in collaboration with writer and editor Raymond Foye, and created illuminated manuscripts with poets Robert Creeley and Allen Ginsberg.

Finally, when asked by Obrist for his advice to emerging artists, Clemente inspired the audience with a powerful quote from Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, “one must always warn the young artist not to buy into the idea that beauty does not exist, that beauty is frivolous, that beauty is unnecessary. So, the advice is to approach terror and find beauty.”

Discover more from the Artist Talks series, co-presented with Fondation Beyeler, here: