©Neil GreentreeDetail of ‘Angels’ Tent’, at Mary Boone

Francesco Clemente, the painter celebrated for his blend of the erotic and the spiritual, rendered in a rapture of colour, first left his native Italy for an Indian ashram in 1973, when he was just 21. The following year he journeyed to Afghanistan. He moved to New York in 1981 and later explored Brazil and China, and all the while India kept luring him back. Now, in a nod to his life-long wanderlust, he has transformed Mughal-style tents into artworks.
Clemente has been ruminating about how to make a tent into a work of art for decades. “One of the adjectives for my work is nomadic, and the tent is the attribute for the nomadic person,” Clemente says on a sunny autumn day in his Greenwich Village studio. “I’ve given up belonging anywhere, so I belong to the tent. It’s safer to belong nowhere, more convenient.”
Standing 10ft high and nearly 20ft across and covered inside and out with painted angels and skeletons, rainbows and bees, the two tents, “Angels’ Tent” and “Devils’ Tent”, will be the main attraction of Clemente’s solo exhibition opening on November 6 at Mary Boone Gallery in Chelsea, which comes amid the five-month run of his show Francesco Clemente: Inspired by India at the Rubin Museum of Art nearby. In what could be read as a lament for our epoch, the angels are in trouble: one is drowning, another is losing a wing. “They’re very frail,” he says.
Made in Jodhpur, India, the tents’ exteriors were laboriously embroidered and silkscreened by craftsmen, their interiors painted by Clemente; so quickly was the paint absorbed that he describes the medium as even more unforgiving than watercolour. “You can’t correct anything. But as a painter once said,” he adds with a laugh, “it’s easy to do if you know how to do it.”

Still startlingly handsome at 62, with a steady gaze from his large, pale blue eyes – recognisable to anyone who has been transfixed by his self-portraits – and just a trace of silver stubble on his head to match his shorn beard, Clemente exudes a serenity that gives him more the air of a guru than a well-connected artist. He is dressed in a combination of eastern and western attire – jeans and a well-worn blazer with a long maroon kurta – and drops erudite poetic references, from William Blake to Henri Michaux. Incense burns in his vast, window-lined studio, which is furnished with a ping-pong table and filled with paintings he made in another space, in Brooklyn. One is of giant orange winter-blooming flowers, which Clemente quips “is appropriate for this time in my life”. Asked if he really feels old, Clemente, who has recently become a grandfather, says wryly, “I’ve been thinking of myself as old since I was 20. At 20 I thought I was going to die at 23.”
The Village studio, his original in New York, is not far from the townhouse he bought from Bob Dylan. Though he says that, as a teenager, he and a friend used to drive around Naples listening to Dylan, the house’s provenance has proved more of an annoyance than an asset: Dylan fans loiter in front and Clemente is forever buying new house numbers to replace the ones they pilfer.
He recalls that he first travelled to India because, like many young people in the early 1970s, he was disillusioned with the “historical narrative of my time, and I wanted to step out of history into geography. I never had a sentimental or romantic view of India. I always thought of India as a contemporary country with a different narrative, and where the sense of the sacred is still alive. I think the solution to a lot of the challenges of our time would be a return to the sacred, but I can’t imagine how that can happen.”

In 1977 Clemente and his wife, Alba, moved to Madras, where his influences ranged from temples to billboards. India also seeped into his work in subtler ways: Beth Citron, assistant curator at the Rubin, notes that, when he painted, “the sun was so strong he couldn’t quite see the colours until dusk.” Not in a bad way – Clemente’s sensual purples, reds, blues, greens and golds are among his signatures. Says Clemente: “Colour is like grace. Colour is something you don’t work for, you’re given. I wouldn’t say I see it. I would say I feel it. I taste it.”
His immersion in the culture and rejection of such labels as western and eastern, or insider and outsider, are partly what drew the Rubin, which specialises in the art of the Himalayas, to make him the focus of the museum’s 10th anniversary celebration. “He does an incredible job of erasing those boundaries,” says Citron. “He’s always thought of himself as someone who moves between different cultural contexts with facility and ease.”
Which is not to say that Clemente sees no differences between places. “I get my educated Indian friends very upset by insisting on the unique qualities of India because their effort is to show India is just like any other country,” he continues. “When I run out of arguments I say, ‘You know Buddha was not born in Paris, [Sikhism founder] Nanak did not come from Moscow, [mystic poet] Kabir didn’t grow up in the Midwest.’ There is something to that, no?”
In Afghanistan, Clemente observed his mentor, Alighiero Boetti, collaborating with local artisans on his famed embroidered maps. Clemente followed suit, engaging with Indian masters of ancient techniques, as well as New York artists and poets from Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat to Allen Ginsberg. “To me, it’s part of my reflection on boundaries and the nature of self,” Clemente says. For the Mary Boone show, he teamed with Indian miniaturist Prakash Jay to create a series of works on paper. Clemente painted in watercolour with a loose hand, leaving blank areas for his collaborator to fill with intricate detail according to Clemente’s direction.

‘Moon’, on show at the Rubin

He notes with a certain pride that, while Jay “hates” contemporary art, “he’s very impressed with me because I don’t draw first. I just go straight to making it, which is something unheard of in miniatures.”
Quickly categorised as a neo-expressionist figurative painter with the likes of the then red-hot Julian Schnabel, Eric Fischl and David Salle, Clemente received a warm welcome in the US in the early 1980s. But those artists struggled to recoup their cachet after the 1990s crash, and Clemente expresses hostility toward the notion of grouping artists “on the basis of what the work looks like rather than what it’s about”.
His own art, whether frescoes, paintings on fabric or prints, tends to be about sex, death, or sex and death. Skulls and genitalia abound, and in “Meditation” (1991), for instance, while three figures copulate, one plunges a knife through another’s chest. “The only two paths in life that never end are the sexual path and the spiritual path,” Clemente says. “You can’t find two people who will tell you the same thing about it. The main thing is there is no end to it.”
The Clementes’ circle is a glittering one – friends include Scarlett Johansson and Salman Rushdie – and his commissioned portraits, which typically depict their subjects with large eyes and in a reclining position, have long been coveted trophies among a certain set – though particularly for women since, he jokes, “I can’t persuade the men to lie down.” The portraits cost upwards of $250,000 and he executes them in a single sitting. Clemente says he seeks an emotional connection with his subjects. “I have to be completely present but also completely removed. I don’t have to buy into the mask.”
To the broader art-viewing public, Clemente may be best known for his self-portraits. “Our identity is in flux, so from time to time I record the make-believe picture of myself,” he says. He has also frequently painted Alba and his friends, and those images bear a distinct resemblance to Clemente, as do many of the other figures he paints. But Citron cautions against reading a “western ego-based identity” into the similarities. “He’s in every portrait because we all bleed into each other,” she says.
Says Clemente: “I can only make work if I think of what connects, rather than what divides.”

Francesco Clemente, November 6-December 20, Mary Boone Gallery, New York, maryboonegallery.com; ‘Francesco Clemente: Inspired by India’, to February 2, Rubin Museum of Art, New York, rubinmuseum.org

Photographs: Neil Greentree; Grant Delin