FRANCESCO CLEMENTE: SUMMER LOVE IN THE FALL

Lévy Gorvy Dayan opens Francesco Clemente: Summer Love in the Fall, marking the venerated artist’s first exhibition at the gallery’s Beaux-Arts townhouse.

October 29 – December 21, 2024

Clemente’s figuration and symbolism can be felt and read across cultures, religions, and time—drawing inspiration from disparate geographies, mythologies, and antiquities. He once stated, “The Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans are still more alive for me than live people, other painters…. I am a link in the long chain with the past.”

A series of tonal earth-green self-portraits find Clemente considering his identity—both as an artist and a human being, posed with a series of historical, transcultural masks. In other paintings, a horse subsumes the composition, hosting riders that further delve into explorations of personhood; “All horses are Trojan horses,” the artist has quipped with a smile. Elsewhere, vibrant multicolored frescoes feature expressions of eros: nectar drips from a honeycomb heart into open mouths; figures make love amidst lotus petals; and a nymphic Daphne resists Apollo, seen through the gap of a keyhole.

For Clemente, the act of being represents a powerful subject, a malleable and transformative state through which critical questions can be pursued. Signifying fluidity, watercolor has long functioned for Clemente as an important means to stage these explorations. He has said, “The goal of my work is to remind the viewer of the necessity to be fluid, to be in a constant state of transformation.”

With Summer Love in the Fall, Clemente renders luminous visions that reflect on the bodily quality of desire and desire’s promise of transcendence.