Francesco Clemente Reflects on Four Decades of Painting and Transformation
“In Between,” a massive retrospective featuring everything from the artist's early self-portraits to collaborations with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, is on view at the Triennale Milano through September 6
Francesco Clemente often seems to have been with the right people at the right time. Aged just 22, he traveled to Afghanistan with Arte Povero master Alighiero Boetti. In 1980s-era New York, he hung out with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, and decorated the walls of the Palladium nightclub for Steve Rubell. He created a series of paintings for a 1998 adaptation of Great Expectations by Alfonso Cuaron—recast to a swampy Florida—as the work of its protagonist Finn Bell (Ethan Hawke). Salman Rushdie wrote the catalogue essay for a show of his portraits at Gagosian in 2005. In 2024, he had a lively encounter with Ed Ruscha in Interview magazine. Peter Marino is a fan.
Now he has arrived at the Milan Triennale with a major retrospective. Around 70 works hang in its ground-floor galleries, flowing non-chronologically. “The idea was not to impose a narrative, but to let the work speak for itself,” says co-curator Francesca Pietropaolo. “To look at the body as a territory of exploration.” From the early self-portraits that open the show—the first made in 1979 when the artist was 27—to a languorous pose from his wife Alba in 1997 in red dress and gold jewelry, Clemente investigates interiority through the exterior that contains it.
Clemente, who was born in Naples in 1952, moved to New York in 1981. He still has the Soho loft that he acquired soon after, as well as a studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. There are homes in Rome and Amalfi, and he has spent time in Mexico and India. “India is a giant reservoir of things I don’t know,” he says. “There the universe is seen not as a prison, but more like a type of music, where there are rhythms and coincidences.”
His work is infused with this movement between different worlds, both spiritually and stylistically. He was part of Italy’s Transavanguardia in the 1970s and ’80s, which celebrated a return to vibrant, expressionistic painting—exemplified in Equator (1982) with its aggressively layered paint and aroused female figure. But he’s equally at home working with Indian miniaturist painters from Jaipur and Orissa: there is an exquisitely made series from the 1980s with scenes both scatological and cerebral.
Elsewhere, he works with watercolors and pastels; in improvisational collaboration with Basquiat and Haring on a three-hander painting; and with Allen Ginsberg on a beautiful rendition of his poem Black Shroud in 1984. The grand book is here, pages open, in a vitrine, spidery black writing overlaying pages washed with color. Collaboration has always been important: “It’s a good way to step out of your own mind, to not be locked in,” he says. “My ambition from day one was not to go in a straight line. I wanted to develop in a radial way.”
When we speak, Clemente is back in Milan, a week after the opening in June. Alba is performing in a one-woman play, also at the Triennale. “William Forsyth once told me, if you’re making a piece of choreography, put one dancer on the stage, and people will watch,” says Clemente of his wife’s self-written one-hander, though he could be talking about his own portraits. He likes Milan very much. “It’s not a city on the verge of a nervous breakdown, so it doesn’t have the electricity of other places like Rome, and let’s not even mention Naples.” But he is still in love with New York. “You are more charmed by the ugly-beautiful woman than the pretty one,” he says.
While the painter himself is everywhere at the Triennale—often naked, sometimes his face in distorted close-up—he is also thoroughly elusive. “He is always questioning himself, he plays hide and seek,” says Francesca Pietropaolo. In Father, made during extended stays in Brazil between 2006-2008, the artist wears a brilliant red mitre hung with serpents and fish—placing himself between Catholicism and the Brazilian candomblé. In the final paintings, made in 2004, he is the translucent naked figure tumbling to the ground. “The history of mankind is filled with falls,” says Clemente, “from Icarus onwards.”
But sometimes he turns his attention to others. There’s not just the portrait of Alba, made in haste for a show in Pittsburgh when he realised there was not one of her, but a beautiful wall of watercolors. It’s the whole team—Basquiat, Haring, Warhol, Ginsberg—in delicate washes of pinks, greens, and blues. More recently, Clemente was approached by Anthony Vaccarello, creative director of Saint Laurent. “I call it the Great Expectations generation,” says Clemente. “The people who discovered my work through the Cuaron film.” After seeing the movie, Vaccarello commissioned portraits of his muses, including Zoë Kravitz and Isabella Ferrari, for his summer 2025 campaign. Just as in the 1980s, it seems that the fashionable are once again at Clemente’s door.
“In Between” is at The Triennale in Milan until September 6