In any case,
Clemente's
triptych of tents
draws us back to
a paradisal past,
real or imagined,
certainly real
enough in
the collective
unconscious.
Christian imagery, painting selfportraits garbed, respectively, as
St. James and St. Thomas. In
2013, Clemente showed, at the
Yale School of Art, watercolors he
produced in Brazil which include a
Papal figure.
Clemente, in other words, is
ecumenical, perhaps too sanitary
a word for the polymorphous,
primordial imagery in his watercolors,
pastels and tempera paintings. A
winged beast with human features
presides over the entrance to
the tent; delicately formed bees,
dolphins and spiders abound. I am
not trying to Christianize Clemente,
but there is immanence in all the
creatures he depicts or invents,
human or not: all are incarnations
of the Divine, invocations of every
Creation story on earth. Clemente's
paintings for this tent are a series
showing various states of human
endeavor, staged in an imagined
realm where a fluid exchange
between the human and animal
takes place, a variegated play of
anthropomorphic and zoomorphic
forms.
HYLAND
