WINDOWS

‘A note by the artist, written in the third person.’

Giorgio De Chirico used to name his still lives ‘vite silenti’, silent lives.

Like his brother Savinio, he often painted rooms inhabited by images of furniture and by heterogeneous objects who seem to be animated by their own inner life, just as vivid as our own or as the inner life of the sky or of the sea imagined in antiquity.

Giorgio Morandi painted landscapes observing them through a binocular from the window of his studio, calm landscapes filtered through the viewpoint of domestic safety.

A century later the experience of landscape as a silent and living thing, a projection of the soul and an object of longing is still resonant.

The group of paintings simply named Windows is the most recent chapter of the varied, fragmented and yet coherent inner monologue being recited for half a century by Francesco Clemente, a monologue not unlike a song, joyful and sad, relentlessly indifferent to contemporaneity.

But is what Clemente says to himself a monologue? Or is it a dialogue with the past and a reaching out into the future of an artist who refutes the materialistic premises of our time and its inherent nihilism? Ultimately the artist's convictions and reasons fade in front of the main event: painting, painting which cannot be harnessed to a cause, or a hope, or a need.

In Windows, we witness incomprehensible events happen in the glowing warmth of rooms-wombs. We glimpse the Sea, the Trees, the Mountain, through symmetrical windows or, in the last painting of the group, through a crack in the ceiling: here, escape can only happen in the verticality of contemplation and timelessness.

Escape is the only serious choice.

Escape from an ancestral Fort, the Castel dell’Ovo in Naples, reflected in a splash of water, escape from the life-boat-love-boat stranded on the reefs of lovers misunderstandings, escape from the tenderness of Milk and Cloth, from the felled Christmas Tree, from a Japanese painting of a Mystic Fox, from the embrace of a Giant Fish caught in a Net, emblem of the inevitability of life, life which, as our own wrist, our hand can only touch lightly but never grasp.

From the windows of these eventful and silent rooms we watch the sea best described by Fernando Pessoa when he wrote:

‘God placed danger and the abyss in the sea.

But he also made it heaven’s mirror.’

Manhattan, New York

December 2023