Francesco Clemente

These highly imaginative paintings have a narrative quality, and the series Nostalgia, Utopia brings together works completed in Italy and New York City. In one, milk-painted quilt patterns are overlaid with fragments from Piranesi’s fantastical etchings of subterranean prisons. In another, yellow taxicabs queue up against a backdrop of erotically paired figures inspired by Indian epics and myth. The different elements in Clemente’s paintings are at once familiar, mysterious and rich in symbolism. The viewer is left with the impression that the paintings cannot be tied down in any single time or place. The book also includes a new series of gouache and sanguine drawings by Clemente, as well as photographs of iconography directly related to these drawings. The poet Peter Lamborn Wilson contributes an essay on this artist’s newest work.