Francesco Clemente on Painting as Poetry and Performance

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TRANSCRIPT

SPENCER BAILEY: Hi, Francesco. Welcome to Time Sensitive.

FRANCESCO CLEMENTE: Thank you for having me. Hello, everyone.

SB: I think we should start here with Clemente Bar, this new space at Eleven Madison Park. How did this project come about?

FC: Clemente Bar is yet another love song to New York City. In New York, you keep meeting people who are more brilliant than you, more energetic than you, more committed than you, more talented than you, more handsome than you. It’s a lovely way to live, to be always the less-gifted person in the room.

In this case, I met Chef Daniel Humm, who is, to say the least, a driven and dedicated person, and we simply fell in love with each other. He came up with the idea of Clemente Bar. And I do as I’m told—

SB: [Laughs]

FC: —because I believe very much in the idea that one thing leads to another, so I immediately said yes.

SB: What works did you create for it? Could you share a little bit about the space? I understand the tasting counter is inspired by Alba, your wife.

FC: Yes, Alba, as usually she does, has a place in all of this because I was discussing with Daniel the idea of executing some frescoes. I make frescoes as in real frescoes. It would take too long of a time to explain what it is, but it is the same fresco that you see at the Met made by the Romans two thousand years ago, the same pigments, even—they come from the same places.

So we were discussing that idea, but then the architecture of the bar is all panel wood, dark. Alba just said one night, “gold in the dark.” And again, I followed, “gold in the dark.” I executed two paintings which are complementary. They face each other. One is behind the bar and the other across from the bar. And then a third painting for a room next door. I just got them out of the way. I like to get things done like that. They’re very naughty as everything I do is, but hopefully understated enough that if you don’t pay too much attention, you just see something seductive and pleasant, and you don’t see all the poison contained in the sweet pill.

SB: Which is sort of what a bar should be, right? [Laughs]

FC: A bar to me is the bar at the end of that famous Luis Buñuel film, Simon of the Desert, where you see this lunatic on top of a column in the middle of Mount Sinai screaming at the gods. And then he goes on and on screaming. And then in the last shot of the film, he is sitting alone in a bar in New York City.

SB: Perfect. [Laughter] What does it mean to you to have this sort of “immersive” Clemente space, if we could call it that?

FC: Well, painting is a communal activity. Where is community? You look for community. Is community in a museum? Is community in the atrium of a bank? Where is community? I pretty much think it’s safe to say that a bar is community, particularly in a city, like a real city, a living city like New York. And because it’s a living city, this is why one loves New York. A bar is a place of a community, an imaginary community.

SB: I think I should say here that Clemente Bar isn’t the first atypical space where you’ve presented work. Back in the mid-eighties, you painted murals for the Palladium nightclub—since demolished, but it was a popular club in the eighties in New York. And later you also created a mural and lampshades for the Hudson Hotel, which was opened in 2000. Both of these were Ian Schrager projects. Could you talk a bit about your work for those two?

FC: It is surprising to say the least that forty years have gone by, and I’m still out at night, I suppose. 

SB: [Laughs]

FC: My children were told by somebody already twenty years ago, somebody told them, “You know, your father was out at night ten years ago, and he was already old.” So I’ve been too old to be out at night for decades now.

SB: [Laughs]

FC: Both the Palladium and the Hudson Hotel were remarkable endeavors because I did the Palladium with a great architect, Arata Isozaki. And the Hudson Hotel with a great architect, Philippe Starck. 

Particularly the Palladium was a very intense and memorable moment because I was there with Kenny Scharf, and Keith Haring, and [Jean-Michel] Basquiat under the supervision of Steve Rubell, who was, again, a very New York character, who proclaimed that the artists were the rock stars of the eighties. I don’t know if we were rock stars, but we were as young as rock stars. I have fond memories of that moment.

SB: I guess in a certain sense, all of these spaces could be called “performative.” You’ve also got this performance layer to some of your work. I’m thinking here about the two-hundred-some works you made for Alfonso Cuarón’s 1998 film, Great Expectations. Also your “The Sopranos” series of these eight performers, these opera stars that were at the Metropolitan Opera in 2008. Tell me about how you think about this performance layer.

FC: The encounter with Cuarón was very amusing because he came to me through a spectacularly bohemian friend, such a mythical woman whose mother had the claim to fame that she had seven children from seven different men and then found an eighth man to father them all. This lady was very bohemian and I never expected her to bring me somebody non-bohemian. So when I met Alfonso, I didn’t realize that he was a Hollywood director by then. [Laughs]

I accepted to do the work for the film. One of the reasons I accepted right away, again, is because I was always very fond of the poetry of Fernando Pessoa and of the idea that one could write poems in different registers under different names. And this is a dream I haven’t been able to fulfill because I keep being Francesco Clemente of the Clemente Bar fame. 

SB: [Laughs]

FC: But the film gave me a chance to imagine myself as this teenager in Florida with this troubled past and present, and imagine a completely different context.

And the “Sopranos” project came from Dodie Kazanjian, who was curating the art program at the Metropolitan Opera. I’d been making portraits of ladies whom I call “dragon ladies” because they were these very tough women in their fifties with great personalities. And all these portraits were people, like, I did a portrait of Fran Lebowitz, a portrait of Toni Morrison, a portrait of my friend, Helen Marden, Gita Mehta. They were all writers I admired very much—or artists, in Helen Marden’s case. And all these portraits were horizontal.

But then when I was asked to paint the sopranos, I thought, The sopranos cannot lie down—they have to stand up, because I have to be level with the subject. I had to build a scaffold, and the sopranos were on top of this scaffold so that they would be sitting down and I could paint level with their faces. It was a big production. But none of them misbehaved. They were all very well-behaved.

The only one who misbehaved was not in this context. It was Jessye Norman. I was asked to do a watercolor portrait of her, and she showed up six months and six hours late. [Laughter] The six months didn’t matter so much. The six hours made it difficult, because I don’t have any electrical light in my studio because I don’t allow overhead lights. Just like I heard [Lorenzo] Mongiardino, the greatest interior decorator, he never allowed overhead lights. Basically, there are no lights in my studio. And I paint in daylight. And so if you show up six hours late, I had to do the portrait practically in the pitch dark.

SB: How did it come out?

FC: Lovely, lovely. Very dreamy because you can’t see anything.

SB: [Laughs] Well, I feel like darkness is a huge part of your work, in any case, this idea of shadow.

FC: I’m glad you noticed that, and I’m glad no one else notices it because my life would be even more difficult if all the darkness was on the foreground. But luckily, again, this is something you read in some ancient text: that one should coat in sugar the bitter pill of spiritual instruction.

SB: More broadly, I was curious to ask you about the intersection of art and space. There’s this quote of yours that I wanted to bring up here. You’ve said, “I’ve always wanted to imagine that the works belong, if not to a civilization, at least to a place in space, and that I am simply unearthing the material from the different places I find it.”

FC: Yes, I like to be engaged in a conversation with the dead, basically, and with the unborn. I find it easier to talk to the dead than to the living, because they don’t talk back.

Again, painting is a communal activity. I’m a painter. This is important to also notice. Somehow I talk so much about other things, one forgets that the only reason I’m allowed to talk about anything is because I know a thing or two about painting. And again, what is community today? Whom do you talk to? Whom do you imagine to talk to? Is it the artists around you? That may happen for a period of your life, but it won’t go on through your entire life. There will be moments where you communicate more, and moments you communicate less.

And also, do we agree with the order of the world as it is? I don’t. I really don’t agree. I don’t agree with the general views of things. I don’t agree with what things are done in the name of rationality. Really? I’m the crazy artist and you guys are the rational people leaving behind a trail of blood? I don’t think so. So I like to imagine I belong to really a different civilization, if not a different planet altogether.

SB: So in painting, are you creating alternate narratives, alternate realities? Is that how you see it?

FC: Well, even alternatives would be a mistake, because you don’t paint against something. The first step to have a life worth living is not to live reactively. Anything that is a reaction is born of fear. Everything that is born of fear is born of dual thinking. Everything that is born out of dual thinking is hopeless. It won’t lead you anywhere. So is it possible to really come out of emptiness? Our rational friends, they say that it is not possible. They say we are locked in the past. I simply don’t believe that.

SB: Do you think about the act of painting as performance?

FC: When I became an artist, painting was completely discredited. This is hard to imagine right now. But there had been ten years of hard-core conceptual art, and process, and all kinds of attitudes. There was a famous exhibition by Harald Szeemann, “When Attitudes Become Form,” so performance art. And painting was simply considered a language that was not worth exploring.

But I felt all of this stuff was really propaganda, and I felt painting really was a legitimate language that could offer a legitimate way out of a mechanical, materialistic view of life. On the other hand, I was influenced by conceptual art, performance art. So when I began to paint, I really did see myself like a performer who was pretending to be a painter.

SB: And you’ve also said that painting is manual labor. So in that sense it’s—

FC: Painting is manual labor. And one of the great, among the many tragedies we are living, is the absence of man-made, handmade things around us. This takes an enormous toll on our happiness. There is really not much happiness in product.

SB: I want to go back to frescoes. You mentioned frescoes briefly. Could you talk about your frescoes in this sense? I think it’s interesting that frescoes, in so many ways, combine what we’ve been talking about: art, architecture, performance. And you’ve described them as the most luminous medium of all.

FC: It is the most luminous medium because it’s the only medium where the pigment is not mixed with any binder. It’s purely water and pigment. So there is not even a minimal contamination of the purity of color. And frescoes do have to do again with my initial attitude: Okay, I’m going to imagine to be a painter. And I’m going to imagine to be a painter who is not bound to the contemporary world. And I’m going to imagine to be a painter in ancient Egypt in the third century A.D. with the Roman Empire collapsing, and with all the syncretic religions coming together. I want to live in that period of history, where everything is contaminated, where everything is mixed up, where you never know what you’re looking at. I am very attracted by ambiguity, mystery, anything that is not etched in clear terms.

So I went back to traditional mediums. In New York I painted in oil because I imagined New York to be a Dutch city. I thought about the light of, the Flemish light, and I painted at night. And in Italy I painted frescoes, which I had seen at The Metropolitan Museum [of Art], frescoes attached to panels. I had a friend who was a restorer, so I said, “Can’t we make a fresco and attach it to a panel?” And so we worked it out that way. So they’re frescoes, but they can move around the world.

And frescoes are an extremely simple medium: It’s marble, dust, lime[stone] that has been aged for at least five years, and river sand in a certain mix. And the trick is you have to paint while the plaster is wet. By the end of the day, the plaster dries and the color will not go in. But I have an affinity with all kinds of situations where I can’t entertain second thoughts, so it’s an ideal medium for me.

SB: Another medium that connects to architecture would be these tents that you created, the interiors of which were painted by you, the exteriors embroidered and silk-screened by Indian craftspeople and artisans.

FC: Yeah. The unfulfilled ambition up to this moment is I always thought I would make a nondenominational chapel, but the patronage is lacking, so I haven’t been able to do that. This was one of the impulses to make the tents because they’re almost like chapels.

The other impulse was I spent few years a little bit more detached by the daily exhibition routines and stuff, and I ended up going to China a lot and spending time in China where the macro scale of everything that was so bothering me anywhere else, in China became so comical, and so lighthearted and ridiculous that I thought, Well, why am I so prejudiced about a larger-scale work? I’ll make one. But all I could come up with was something like the tents, which are large works. They’re eighteen feet by twelve feet, and they are nine feet tall. But they still keep all the intimacy, tenderness, softness of my work. I’ll never be able to make public sculpture or something cold, and that is like some type of cultural styling. I’m not good at styling.

SB: Well, there’s still time for a chapel. [Henri] Matisse got a chapel at the end of his life.

FC: Yes. Maybe someone will listen to the podcast and call me immediately.

SB: [Laughs] We’ve talked about performance art and space, but what about time? Where does time come into the picture for you? Do you have particular philosophies or views on time as it relates to your work?

FC: I copy the philosophy of [Jiddu] Krishnamurti when I— In my formative years, I spent a lot of time in Madras in South India in the compound of the Theosophical Society, where Krishnamurti was trained to be the Buddha of our time. And he likes to say that we are eternal but not immortal. So one of the things that painting can do is to remind us both of mortality and eternity. We’re basically in eternity. We are experiencing mortality every moment of our life. Every moment of our life we’re a new person.

SB: So let’s go to Naples. You were born there, in 1952. In previous interviews and conversations, you’ve spoken about how, amongst the older cities in the world, Naples is really one of the only ones that still preserves this original Greek urban grid, and you’ve rightly called it “a pagan city.” Looking back, how do you think about Naples, how it shaped you, your views of the world, and ultimately your life as a painter?

FC: It is a pagan city. Every church in Naples is built on the ruins of a pagan temple. But, as you know, the church adopted all the pre-existent cults and turned them into— The cult of a teenage solar deity into the cult of a young saint and so on and so forth.

Naples is also, again, a city of cultural contamination. When they built the contemporary museum— Álvaro Siza designed the museum of contemporary art in Naples. I was there when they were under construction. They showed me that they were digging from the foundation of the museum a Greek graveyard, then some Roman ruins, then a medieval cemetery, then something else. And I asked, “Don’t you have anything Islamic?” And they said, “Of course we do.” And they came upstairs from the basement carrying these giant baskets filled with exquisite shards of exquisite green and yellow Islamic ceramics. [Laughs] So that’s Naples for you.

SB: The center of civilization.

FC: It’s also a city of paradox. It is a city by the sea, but the city— Someone wrote a book saying, “The sea doesn’t touch Naples.” It’s a city that gives the back to the sea. The sea’s right there, it’s worldwide famous, the Bay of Naples, but the actual life of the city is not about the sea at all. So I guess I learned how to think paradoxically.

SB: I feel like the sea does play a role in a lot of your work, too.

FC: It does play. It is an element in the work in the sense of maybe the fact that it cannot be ordered, or reduced to a particular interpretation, or manipulated in any way.

SB: Yeah. It’s fluid. It’s—

FC: And it’s fluid. So fluidity, autonomy, and an idea of something that doesn’t really end anywhere in particular.

SB: You said that you had “many empty afternoons in Naples,” and that you “seem to find a sense of solace and boredom there.” Could you elaborate on that, this importance of boredom in your youth?

FC: Not only boredom. Boredom, laziness are very, very important elements of life. How are you ever going to know something new, or imagine something new, or feel something new if you keep yourself busy all the time? It’s impossible. You will be caught in a trap of mechanical action-reaction sequences.

And Naples, in the years that I grew up—which we are talking almost a century ago [laughs], was a great school of boredom because there wasn’t really much going on. The entire city is very much made of self-enclosed spaces, every neighborhood. Some neighborhoods, the criminal ones, they even have sentinels at the gate of the neighborhood. So it looks like a large city, but it is a tiny city because you possibly can’t go anywhere because you can’t trespass all the sentinels in different directions. [Laughs]

It’s an elegant city. It’s elegant not to believe in anything. It’s elegant to think that you have it all. The downside of elegance is that things really fall apart. Palaces crumble; they don’t get repainted. Families lose their wealth. Everything goes down the drain, elegantly.

SB: Things get stolen…

FC: Yes, things get stolen. But then what is stealing? You know what I mean? 

[Laughter]

SB: As a child, you wrote poetry and made drawings and painted, so it goes back to your youth. It seems to me that poetry is pretty central to your life as an artist. Could you talk about this link between poetry—and maybe even the transference from poetry to painting?

FC: It begins with the comical or tragic beginning, according to which view you have, which is that my mother was enamored with the idea that I was a prodigy child, and there was back then a prodigy child [Minou Drouet] in France whose poems were read nationwide. And so my mother collected all this stuff that I was saying and then, against my strong objection, decided to publish the collection of my so-called poems in a super elegant book published by the most elegant publisher in Naples. And then she personally placed the book in the window of the bookstore across the gate to my school. I was in—

SB: Yeah. How old were you at this time?

FC: Twelve years old. Can you imagine? I’m still hurting. Even on the podcast, I’m hurting. [Laughter] I was so upset, because at 12, all you want to do—which I actually kept doing through my entire life—is to conform. I never wanted to be anything else than what everybody else appears to be.

This plan of conforming and getting along in an understated and quiet way was completely destroyed by these actions. This was my first encounter with writing because after that, I told my mother, I said, “I will never ever write a word again. I will never say a word again. From now on, I’m going to be a painter and everybody will leave me alone, including you. I can be at peace.”

So I started to paint back then that way. But then I wasn’t at all l’enfant prodigue. It took me many, many years to find my voice. I would say I only found my voice in, well, not that late, but not early either. I must have been, when I had my first important exhibition in Rome, I was maybe 24. Maybe by today’s standard it’s young, but at that time it didn’t seem young.

SB: You arrived in Rome at age 18, and it was in Rome where you came across the work of [Cy] Twombly. You also saw this very transformational, I would call it, exhibition by Joseph Beuys. Could you talk about the works of Twombly and Beuys, and the impact that seeing their work had on you?

FC: I had seen Twombly’s work already when I was 16, in Naples. He was showing with Lucio Amelio, which was a brilliant gallery in Naples who didn’t care about me, because being from Naples, they hated every other person from Naples, including little me. But I’d seen Twombly’s paintings back then, and I was in love with the line, and I was in love with Joseph Beuys’s line, and I was in love with the fact that Twombly could look at antiquity as a living thing.

When thinking of Twombly, I always think of a quote by [Alberto] Savinio. Savinio was the brother of [Giorgio] de Chirico, a very distinguished painter and writer. And Savinio says that the Greek antiquity is not the antiquity of the Germans and the English—is not an antiquity made of marble, and it is the antiquity of the monkey and the goat. And I thought Twombly really could see the monkey and the goat in antiquity. He could see the smell of antiquity. He could see the juice of antiquity, everything.

And Beuys, of course, for someone of my generation, was the alternative to capitalism, celebration of capitalism, and the alternative to the dead-end of class warfare. I belong to a generation—it’s hard to imagine again today, but my generation actually thought they would knock down the capitalistic system, and they engaged in very serious activities to do that, including basically— I grew up, my formative years from 16 to 21 were during the years of a low-level civil war in Italy that included shootings, kidnappings, all kinds of wild things. So Twombly offered a vision of light, and hope, and reconciliation, but not acceptance of this capitalistic dogma, which is getting heavier and heavier by the minute as we speak.

And Joseph Beuys was my connection to a whole period and sensibility from the turn of the century, which I loved, the anthroposophy, theosophy, all these alternative movements that, at the turn of the century, had been attempting to offer an alternative to the direction that the world was taking. So someone like Rudolf Steiner, who wrote and drew. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but Joseph Beuys’s drawings are the exact replica of Rudolf Steiner’s drawings. Rudolf Steiner used to teach his theories making these drawings of cosmic diagrams and this fictional cosmic order that he was propounding and so on.

SB: I feel like now we have to talk about India. [Laughs] We’ve barely talked about India.

FC: Well, that’s the next podcast.

SB: [Laughs] Well, this is a metamorphic place for you, ever since your first visit in 1971. I should say you’ve immersed yourself in Hindu spiritualism, studied Sanskrit. You’ve collaborated closely with local craftspeople, as with on the tents. And you’ve said that India has essentially been your school. What was it like, at age 19, to land in Delhi? What were your first impressions of India?

FC: In Letters to a Young Poet, by Rainer Maria Rilke, there is a letter where he says [something like], “How fortunate you are that you don’t have an artistic profession and you can be a poet while you sit in the post office where you’re employed.” And in socialist India you had a lot of that. You had a lot of poets stuck in post offices.

[Laughter]

I fell in love. My friends who had been to India before me had come back in love with tribal India, colorful India, rural India. I fell in love with socialist India, urban India, bureaucratic India. I fell in love with the fact that this was a contemporary country which did not go by the book of what the contemporary narrative of the West was. They had their own history, and there was a playfulness in the air, which I really connected to.

[Swami] Vivekananda, when he came to America in the 1870s for the world’s religion congress [Editor’s note: the congress being referenced was called the Worlds Parliament of Religions, and it took place in 1893], he said, “Well, in India, on the surface, everything is so tragic, but then deep below there is a tremendous joy of life. And in America, on the surface everything is perfect, but deep down there is great grief and pain.”

I really connected to the joy of life. It’s something unimaginable. They say that if you haven’t seen India, you haven’t seen humanity. It is really the opposite of the cliché of India as a spiritual place in the sense of abstraction. Spirituality is not an abstraction. Spirituality is the proper way to live according to our duty. And our duty is to enjoy life, to feel joy, to promote joy. Joy is contagious. Just like fear is contagious, joy is contagious.

SB: You’ve said that, “To be a painter, I needed to be an exile.” Was India connected to that? And I ask this also because there was a sort of in-betweenness you were looking for. Could you talk about this in-betweenness, this idea of exile?

FC: In later years, I became close to Salman Rushdie, who is Indian, and we are friends on the basis that he thinks I’m a foreigner who doesn’t understand a thing about India, and I think he’s an educated Indian who doesn’t know anything about India either. 

SB: [Laughs] 

FC: But he said something that I believe in, which is— Or maybe he didn’t say it; he borrowed it from somewhere, but he said in one of his books, “You cannot see the circle if you don’t step out of the circle.” I felt that. I felt I had to step out of the circle to see the circle. I wanted to achieve a view of what I was and what the world was. And to do that, I had to be far away from my origin.

But then I realized that to be far away is not enough. You really have to lose yourself in between. Just like in Tibetan Buddhism, there is this idea of the bardo. The bardo is a place in between lives, but the bardo is also a place in between the affirmation of being. When you say “I am,” between the moment you say “I am” and the next moment when you say “I am,” there is a non-place, which is not a non-place, it is a place, but it is a place by absence.

And I realized that my home should be a place of absence where I’m not conditioned by my history as an Italian, or my history as an exile in India, or my history about someone who landed in New York and found a home in New York. My home should be every moment where I’m neither of these things, where I’m no one, nowhere—because that no one and that nowhere are actually the source of everything there is. And you can’t really transmit that, but you can experience it. And you can witness and say, “I experienced it,” and other people can believe you or not.

One of the great saints of contemporary India is Nisargadatta Maharaj. He was a bidi seller in Bombay; he sold cigarettes in a little stall in slum, but he was the holder of a great tradition called Nisarga Yoga, which is the yoga of neti neti: neither this nor that. When he was asked, “How did you become an enlightened being?” he said, “My guru told me ‘You are that.’ And I believed him.” That’s it. There wasn’t a long path to understanding and this and that. It was instantaneous. He was told that that’s how things are, and he believed it. Then, of course, when that happens to you, there is a lifetime to catch up because you go on living. So to reconcile daily life with that knowledge is maybe complicated or simple, but it’s definitely a job.

SB: What was your relationship to religion, spirituality, Hinduism, going into India and then coming out of India? What changed in you?

FC: I remember very, very young—19 years old when I came back, the first time I came back to Italy—everyone’s face seemed so sad and lifeless. But since then I’ve become a little less extreme in my views. And now I see that everywhere is the same, really.

But the early years in India, I spent a lot of time in the south, in Madras, in the gardens of the Theosophical Society, which was this turn-of-the-century organization that had looked for a prophet over time and they had found Krishnamurti, and made Krishnamurti famous. Then Krishnamurti abandoned them and said, “I’m not a prophet. Truth is a pathless land.” Then he just moved on. In the Theosophical Society, I read a lot, I read a lot of all the books from the different traditions because theosophy claimed that there is no religion higher than truth.

In a way, I believe that there is no religion higher than truth. I’m not comfortable so much with the religions of the book because it seems to me they’re all very intolerant and they’re not community-based. They all rely on authority and intolerance. I know it’s ridiculous to say this because half of the world is religious of the book, but so what? We see the results. But of course there is bloodshed everywhere in the name of religion. That’s not the issue.

But I like to think of religion, again quoting Krishnamurti, as a word coming from religare, which means “to connect together.” Anything that leads you to connect things to one another and to reconcile things that seem opposite to one another, that’s a good religion. If something leads to reconciliation, acceptance, and openness, and fluidity, it is a good thing. I learned from those traditions, but I’m sure the same learning is everywhere else.

SB: At the end of the seventies, you came to America, but you came from India through Japan, as I understand it. What memories do you have from Japan, if any?

FC: I think it made me strong to arrive to New York that way and not from Europe, because Europe doesn’t understand America at all. Also, Europe makes you weak because Europe is comfortable no matter what. You don’t have to be wealthy to be comfortable in Europe. But coming from India— India is not comfortable, it’s not reassuring, it’s not lazy. I mean everybody’s very out there. So to arrive to America from that side was a good thing for me.

And the stop in Japan was organized by Crown Point Press—it was a printing press in Oakland, California. They invited me to make prints. They sent me a ticket to Japan and they sent me an introduction to a temple in Kamakura. That was a spectacular way to approach [Japan], because every morning I would wake up in this temple and there were only two monks, the young monk and the old monk. The old monk wouldn’t talk to me. He had been to Columbia University, seemed very educated and very sophisticated. The young monk would take me by the hand, and take me to the roof of the temple, and show me this giant view of fog, and then say “Mount Fuji.” And yes, very faintly in the fog there was Mount Fuji. It is true. It seems like a Zen lesson without the Zen lesson. You know what I mean? [Laughter] Like, look into the void and see something into the void.

SB: And so you arrive in New York. And soon enough you’re collaborating with this incredible cast of characters: Andy Warhol, Basquiat, the beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who became your friend. And I wanted to ask about Ginsberg in particular because he was someone you grew up reading, so this was like meeting your teenage years’ hero.

FC: Yes, I met my teenage hero. And even if I’m a follower of the famous instruction that says, “If you like the single, don’t listen to the album. If you like the album, don’t go to the concert. If you like the concert, don’t meet the artist,” Ginsberg was an exception to this rule because he was not just as great as I imagined, but greater in the sense that he was really, for me, the embodiment of compassion in the Buddhist term of the word. He was a practicing Buddhist, a Vajrayana Buddhist.

Compassion means flexibility and intelligence of situations where you can turn every situation, no matter how bad the situation is—you have the intelligence, the wit, your spirit is so vivid that you can turn the situation around and make it into something that is open and not shut. He really had that.

So I not only found a poet friend with whom we made illustrated manuscripts—because we were both very fond of William Blake and we wanted to do our own William Blake. He wrote by hand this long poem, “White Shroud,” and I illustrated it, and then we did some other work together.

But I just found someone who taught me…. It is not impossible to live in an intelligent way if you can be that present. He really was that present without being too invasive. He was discreet, but present.

So yeah, this happened through Raymond Foye, and Raymond Foye knew all of the poets that I admired. And some poets I didn’t know yet about, like John Wieners. I didn’t even know Robert Creeley. They became also my favorite poets. And later on, with Raymond in Madras, we published a group of legendary books called Hanuman Books, where we published all the beat poets, and we published all these others from the 1930s in Europe, which I admired because they were all sorts of secular mystics like Simone Weil, or René Daumal, Jean Genet, all of those things.

SB: So your mother once published you as a poet, but you got to go publish some of your heroes. [Laughs]

FC: I did get the poetry bug and poetry still offers me comfort. I miss Ginsberg terribly today because I really would like to know what he would say or see in everything that happens. He really had a very unique point of view, always.

SB: There’s a certain sense of geography to your life and work that I wanted to bring up here, too, that—sometimes it’s more literal, like with your 1985 painting, “The Four Corners.” But when I also look at all of your portraits, I see them as a sort of geography, a map, an atlas, something like that. Do you view them that way?

FC: These were my early, early, early, early statements about who I was. There was the idea of finding a territory without enemies, so I was imagining that. And I also was imagining to escape history into geography. History seemed a dead end. Who wants to be part of history? History is the history of slaughter. What is history? The history is the history of bloodshed. Who wants to be part of that? I don’t want to be part of that. I do not want to be like the very bloodthirsty culture, like you see in the [Museo Nacional de Antropología] of Mexico City, there is, I think they’re the Aztecs. No? They were the more…. 

But the Aztecs were not in Mexico. In any case, one of these cultures that liked human sacrifice, they left behind a few things that are not very tasteful, let’s put it that way. But then there is a sculpture in the museum in Mexico City of a blind singer, and he’s just sitting with his blind eyes to the sky, and he’s singing—his mouth is open and breaking into song. So I want to be on the side of the blind poets, not on the side—

SB: The eternal present.

FC: The eternal present, yes. But now all of this stuff is Instagram, so we won’t talk of spirituality that way, because already other friends are talking about it in bits and pieces.

SB: [Laughs] In terms of your personal geography, we’ve talked about India and Italy and New York, but I also wanted to ask about the American Southwest. I know you had a studio in New Mexico and you began traveling there in the eighties. What was it about the Southwest and New Mexico that drew you in?

FC: The geography of those years that I liked, in the 1920s, included the Southwest. The mystics of the 1920s, they had Madras and they had Ponape, which is a small island in the Pacific where there are some unexplained ruins, and they had Taos. And so, once I had an exhibition in Dallas, I borrowed the radar for the car from my galleries and I drove it a thousand miles per hour across Texas, which—the land is beautiful. I saw the mountain coming up, and I ended up in Chimayo, which was a legendary sanctuary, which I knew about from an Italian writer, [Elémire Zolla], who writes about mystic traditions around the world. And when I arrived to Chimayo, everyone in Chimayo seemed to know me. They were all saying, “Oh, welcome back. It’s nice to see you,” but I’d never been there. So this was the beginning.

[Laughter]

SB: A past life.

FC: I do come from Italy. Italy has San Francesco, Saint Francis, who is someone who used to apologize to the ground when he was stepping on the ground. When you walk on the land in New Mexico, you understand why he did that. Because really it is a living thing. The land is a living thing. Everything is a living thing, but it’s very difficult to live according to that. To recognize living things in the ashtray would make your life very complicated. But in New Mexico, when you walk, you can actually have the luxury of feeling how much it is a living thing.

SB: Mmm. Returning to the subject of time, there’s this sort of timeworn quality to your work, at least I see it that way. And it recalls or alludes to this timeworn quality, I think, of these places that you love: Naples, India, New York, the American Southwest. You’ve previously said, “I like anything that bears the marks of time.” And I think about that when I look at your paintings. Do you see a connection between this timeworn element of these places and the timeworn element of your work?

FC: Yes, I like texture and I like softness. There are enough hard surfaces in our life. Who needs one more hard surface? So yes, I do find particular…. Yes. You find that softness in the desert when you notice that the ground is covered with this film of living things, this dust, which is not dust, but that they’re actually living things, lichens, moss, all kinds of things that one of your steps can destroy. It will take five years to come back there. 

You find that same texture when you walk around Benares, in India, and there is not an inch of a wall that is not stained and marked by the rain, the weather, the people who went by. I find great comfort in seeing how things are not forever set. They keep moving and they move with them, and they follow their trail. I accept also to wear out. I want to be as worn as the stuff around me that I love.

SB: I wanted to end today’s conversation with a quote about your work by your friend the great Salman Rushdie. He writes, “Clemente is a metamorph par excellence—actor, clown, mask, avatar—and, as slippery as the legendary Old Man of the Sea, he wriggles hard when you try to pin him down. You have to hold on tightly, and for a long time, while he mutates ceaselessly to elude your grasp, and only at the very end, when you are both exhausted, does he give up his secrets and tell you what you need to know.”

[Laughter]

I feel like the listeners today have gotten to experience some of this, hopefully, the wonder of what it is to engage with you and your work. So, thank you.

FC: Thank you so much.

SB: Yeah, thank you, Francesco. Thank you for coming.

FC: Thank you.

This interview was recorded in The Slowdown’s New York City studio on August 9, 2024. The transcript has been slightly condensed and edited for clarity. The transcript has been slightly condensed and edited for clarity. The episode was produced by Ramon Broza, Emily Jiang, Mimi Hannon, Emma Leigh Macdonald, and Johnny Simon. Illustration by Diego Mallo based on a photograph by Ye Fan.