Morning

Description

Francesco Clemente’s introduction to the international art world came at the 1980 Venice Biennale, where he exhibited with his friends and fellow Italians Sandro Chia, Enzo Cucchi, and Mimmo Paladino. All of these artists employed a certain form of raw or crude drawing, often in conjunction with a private symbolism and the occasional reference to Italian history. Clemente’s work is the most enigmatic of the group, where the meaning is often the most open-ended and least obvious. His work is often characterized by an extremely expressive and powerful use of line.
Clemente is well versed in a wide variety of media: woodcuts, etchings, monotypes, watercolors, oils, pastels, frescoes, mosaics, photographs, drawings on paper and paintings on nearly any available surface from shovels to cement blocks to mirrors. Morning is a tour de force: printed from fourteen woodblocks with forty-five colors, it has the fluency characteristic of a watercolor drawing. The bust-length nude female, depicted in colors evocative of the dawn, aptly conveys the brilliance of early morning light.
"I remain close to a kind of basic attitude about art and about why I have to make art and what kind of experiences or needs make me do art," Clemente said in 1981. "I try to forget about the problems of art as a language which is evolving."
Sean Ulmer, "A Matter of Degree" 11/2001
Clemente's woodcut is a tour de force: printed from 14 woodblocks with 45 colors, it has the fluency characteristic of a watercolor drawing. The bust-length nude female, depicted in colors evocative of the dawn, aptly conveys the brilliance of early morning light.