FRANCESCO CLEMENTE

Initiated in 2010, Clemente’s Winter Flowers series emerged from a collaboration with the artist’swife of nearly five decades, the actress and choreographer Alba Primiceri. One winter, Alba broughtan assortment of flowers to Clemente’s New York studio. Plucked from the city’s parks and gardens,these blooms had survived the cold. Inspired by their enduring beauty, Clemente embarked on aseries of floral paintings using a carefully determined selection of plant and vegetable pigments.As they took form, the paintings’ relation to the winter season became consonant with the artist’scontemplation of old age. While the flower has been used in traditional vanitas paintings torepresent impermanence and the inevitability of decay, Clemente depicts blossoms to celebrate thebeauty that can be found in all stages of life.

The Winter Flowers canvases, each a large square format, feature abundant displays of color,texture, and form. Rhythmic compositions of petals, leaves, stamen, and seed pods move betweenabstraction and figuration. The largest two canvases are painted in grisaille, a painting techniquein which an image is created entirely in shades of gray. Inspired by the grisaille works of the late-Baroque painter Luca Giordano, from Clemente’s hometown of Naples, as well as contemporaryBalinese grisaille painting, the artist has worked in this manner in previous series, including hisGrisaille Self-Portraits of the late 1990s. Here, we see Clemente applying grisaille to his WinterFlowers for the first time.

The materials Clemente selected for the series mandate a slow execution in several phases, imbuingthe works with an energy of spiritual contemplation. Clemente has compared his process in paintingthese canvases to that of weaving, wherein compositional threads appear and disappear. Ratherthan developing in a linear fashion, the paintings grow radially, in surprising directions from variouscentres of interest. This mode of creating, he explains, corresponds most to his understanding ofconsciousness: ‘I believe that the most accurate description of our consciousness is continuity ofdiscontinuity. So, I indicate with my work the fact that we have a fragmented self and I’m interestedin the gaps that separate all our different personas.’

Throughout his career, Clemente has returned to botanical motifs, whether as ornamentalvegetation or symbolically redolent perennials. With Winter Flowers, the artist offers a deeplypersonal yet universally resonant reflection on temporality and joy.