Symbolist with Roller Skates

By ROBERT HUGHES

Three or four years ago, when the surprise of new figurative painting coming out of Europe was still fresh, when American critics were slapping the label of neoexpressionism on everything that moved, there was a good deal of excitement in New York City over three young Italian painters nicknamed, whether for convenience or as a tribute to their common origin in the land of opera, the three Cs--Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente and Enzo Cucchi.

Cucchi made end-of-history folk art, full of skulls and torrents of lava, cemeteries and crowing cocks. Chia, in a melange of 20th century styles ranging from early Mussolini to late Chagall, did ladylike coal heavers expelling wind while floating in postures vaguely derived from classical statuary. And Clemente? Somewhat more elusive, various and parody resistant: a survivor. The three Cs are now reduced to two, if one can judge from the abysmal quality of Chia's New York show last winter--whimsies impacted into cliche by the stress of overproduction. This month Clemente is on stage, blanketing Soho with paintings and drawings. He has three separate shows (one more than Cucchi had earlier in the season) at the Leo Castelli, Sperone Westwater and Mary Boone galleries.

At 33, Clemente is a curiously polymorphous artist. He works, not always with the same assurance, in numerous media: fresco, watercolor, pastel, oil on canvas, sketchy washes over silver leaf. His work embraces a lot of art-book references, from the overripe baroque of his native Naples to Tantric symbolism. It is full of occultism, tarot, necromancy, devils, Sabbats and pallid sexual grotesquerie. It always looks hasty. It is heavy on the orifices: eating, coupling, defecating; the mood varies from mysterioso rhetoric to voyeurism. One moment Clemente is quoting poses from Giulio Romano's illustrations to Aretino to Indian miniatures (he spends part of each year painting near Madras); the next, copying a spiral staircase out of Mario Praz's Illustrated History of Furnishing; and after that, doing a billboard-size head of Grace Jones with skulls for teeth.

Part of the secret of his success is that his eclecticism creates surface expectations of major art (complexity, depth, psychic intensity and so on) without discharging them in explicit meanings. He wittily exploits the affinity between artist and charlatan. A symbolist with roller skates, he moves very quickly across a vast terrain of appropriated motifs, and the results are usually banal. Even in today's morass of worthless "personal" imagery, it would be hard to find a sillier painting than one in the Castelli show of a green whirlpool a la Poe with a man and his separated genitals disappearing into it.

Now and then, however, Clemente comes up with a visual proposal so unexpected and so sweetly eccentric in its poetry that it compels assent. One, at Sperone Westwater, is his big canvas of beach rocks and pebbles, wetly reflecting a bluish light--a slice of nature into which, for no discernible reason, five red-spoked wheels of the kind one sees on a child's cart or tricycle have been introduced. It could almost be a real scene: anyone who has beachcombed knows what oddities accumulate at the sea's edge. Four identical wheels, or three, one would take for flotsam. But five? Wheels of fire occur in Ezekiel; in traditional Christian iconography, a superior grade of heavenly being called a Throne was represented by a red wheel. But whether Clemente's wheels are intended as grounded angels is anyone's guess. By the simplest means, one is shifted sideways into a parallel world of accumulated improbabilities. At its best, and especially in the smaller work--the pastels and drawings at Mary Boone--Clemente's work lives a tremulous, only part decipherable life at the juncture of Eros and cultural memory. It is rarefied, intelligent and decadent, though its intelligence is more literary than plastic and its decadence never fails to make collectors want to cuddle it.

Given his light and wide-ranging fancy, his educated touch in combining the lyrical with the hermetic, Clemente is an artist one would wish to admire more. But an affair like this three-gallery show presents obstacles. Why so large? The painter who insists on showing everything has a fool for an agent. Clemente is an overproducer, in a spirit of gauzy fecundity; and when he is light, he is very, very light.

Lurking somewhere in this inflated presentation is a leaner and better show, a quarter the size. It would include eight or ten of the smaller works at Boone, only one of the paintings at Sperone Westwater (the pebbles), and maybe three from Castelli, carefully omitting a row of little portraits of friends on one wall, all but a couple of which radiate enough affectless chic and cosmetic anxiety to obscure whatever interest in the look and character of the human face may have prompted them in the first place. When Clemente draws a face, it is usually a mask, front on, staring and strained in a conventionally "expressive" manner. He has that in common with amateurs, though he does more with these masks than any amateur could.

The enigma of Clemente's present career is his reputation in some quarters as a draftsman. In fact, he draws like a duffer and seems quite unable to make a mark that possesses much autonomous grace or power. Likewise, the bigger the work, the more strained its surface. Clemente uses pastel with verve and charm, but in his hands, oil paint becomes a scruffily pedantic coating. If he did not already have such a worldwide reputation, one would say that here is a young artist worth watching. As things are, one can only hope that the work eventually catches up with the fuss made over it. There is time for that.