- Dates
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Francesco Clemente: The Departure of the Argonaut and other lithographs
This exhibition highlights Clemente’s 1986 illustration for the first English translation of La partenza dell’argonauta (1918) by Alberto Savinio (1881-1952), brother of the painter Giorgio de Chirico. These pages, which are both autobiographical and fictional, are vivid and modern in their means and tone, recounting the author’s experience of the war in 1917, when he was forced to leave France and cross the sea to reach the Salonika front. The artist comments on his experience with great freedom, occasionally mixing a detail from the narrative with the subject of his own imagination. Forty-eight large-format black or colour zincographs were created, with imagery ranging from marginal illumination to the submersion of typography through intensely coloured gouache and oversized drawings. The result is a truly ‘shared landscape’ of text and illustration that places The Departure of the Argonaut in the tradition of such great books as Parallèlement (Bonnard/Verlaine, 1900), À toute épreuve (Miró/Éluard, 1958), L’asparagus (Fautrier/Ponge, 1963) and Maximiliana (Max Ernst/G. Tempel, 1964).
It also includes two monumental zincographs that extend the theme of the work, as well as the woodcuts of Febbre alta (1982), which are more cipher than illustrative, more rustic and squat than symphonica, acting as a counterpoint. There are also twelve monotypes of splendid chromaticism, scanned on the occasion of the self-portrait, pieces selected from a series of one hundred and eight (the sacred number in Buddhism) produced between May and July 1986.
Born in Naples in 1952, the artist currently lives in New York, although he often spends time in Madras (India) and Italy. With the exception of the monotypes on loan from Clemente, the Sperone Westwater Gallery in New York and Thomas Ammann in Zurich, all the works on display come from the Graphic Arts Collection in Geneva.
