FRANCESCO CLEMENTE

A bat that’s bigger than your ear watches you sleep while you dream him there. / The black serpent vortex rises round-eyed, fist & black heart arrow-pierced. / Grave ghosts guard the chthonic cellar door steps out to cypress, sky & clouds. / She poses self-confident, blue sky & clouds in her oval womb.

—Allen Ginsberg, excerpts from “Pastel Sentences,” 1995

Night (1994) is from Francesco Clemente’s series of pastels titled Ex Libris Chenonceau after the site where part of the series was first exhibited: the Château de Chenonceau in the Loire Valley. In June 1995, Allen Ginsberg and Clemente traveled together to visit the site. Ginsberg immediately began writing the “Pastel Sentences”: one-line poems that each corresponded to a pastel on display. It would be one of the legendary poet’s last extensive works before he passed away in 1997. Pastels have been an integral part of Clemente’s practice since the late ’70s and form a unique material link between the eclectic references he employs and his own potent vocabulary of images, figures, and symbols.

FRANCESCO CLEMENTE
Night (Ex Libris Chenonceau)
1994
Pastel on paper
26 3/8 x 19 inches (67 x 48.3 cm) LG-10318-19
Courtesy of Francesco Clemente Studio; Collection of the Artist, New York