Francesco Clemente: Anima nomade

Francesco Clemente. Anima nomade is the largest solo show dedicated to the artist ever staged in Italy for the importance of the works on display, ranging from his astonishing Tents produced between 2012 and 2014 to his series of large wall paintings realized on the museum's walls especially for the occasion.

The exhibition has been devised to resemble a large installation that seamlessly unfolds in the exhibition galleries on the first floor of Palazzo Esposizioni, comprising three groups of works: the six Tents, the twelve Flags and the wall painting cycle entitled Ocean of Stories.

The exhibition immerses visitors in the India and Oriental tradition that has always been a source of inspiration for Francesco Clemente, enveloping them in a fabric dense with iconographical references and the private, diary-like sensitivity of his works.

Born in Naples but a nomad by calling, strongly influenced by literature and poetry, Clemente is a fully-fledged poet with a vast vocabulary of symbolic and metaphorical images. His works are declined in an all-embracing aesthetic landscape, at once metaphysical and mystical, cadenced by the representation of self, often entangled with erotic references, always lyrical and emotional and always expressed through an all-encompassing sense of colour.

His tents, inspired by Upanishad and Buddhist philosophy, embody the spirit of a wandering existence and represent "shelters for nomads". Clemente describes them as "the result of many disparate threads that have become interwoven in my mind over the years" – the symbol of a wanderer's life chosen to escape a single, linear vision of history and to embrace a global geography. The tents, with their walls painted with luminous tempera colours, conjure up imaginary worlds and echo sacred sites such as the Mogao Caves, or Thousand Buddha Grottoes, in Dunhuang, China, or the Ajanta and Ellora Caves in India, spaces for meditation that have made a deep mark on the artist's cultural memory. Each tent – from the Angels's Tent to the Pepper Tent – is an interior world rich in symbols, memories and reflections stratified over time.

The twelve Flags facing each other, suspended aloft to form a corridor to be passed through, are painted on both sides: on one side they bear symbolic yet recognisable figures, on the other, enigmatic aphorisms embroidered in gold. Both sides appear to be individual works, polarities of paint and lettering yet which merge with one another in their separation, like light and shade.

And finally, the wall painting cycle entitled An Ocean of Stories, produced on site for the occasion, ideally opens and closes the exhibition, bringing together all the experiences in a slender, unbroken line that suggests an ongoing, circular narrative. Thus Clemente recreates an imaginary journey in which each element, from colour to line, reflects the essence of a wandering soul in endless movement.