Two of the Vanitas frescoes in the current exhibition are simple in composition, two rather complicated. Love – and Clemente’s titles are always provocative – shows a figure of unidentified sex lying naked in the foetal position with hands covering its face. The figure is isolated in a stark zone of red ground, surrounded by a low wall. This zone appears to be on the top of a tower, or at least a structure composed of rectilinear bricks. Is this passion enclosed by conformity or something sadder, a human being cut off from all other beings, trapped in a man-made cell? The Cloud takes up an image that has become emblematic for the artist in recent years – a top-heavy cloud with arms that stretch to embrace its mirror-image reflected below. The middle zone between the two clouds seems to emphasise an emptiness, a big, flattened ‘O’ lying on its side. The other two frescoes, The Rose and Parabola, are more reminiscent of earlier works, in that there is a sense of constant motion engendered in all parts of the paintings, in one by the tendril-like coils that surround and define the figure, in the other by the legs and arms that sway and extend, dancelike, towards all quarters. Parabola also contains one of those famous Clementian double-entendres, in which an object – in this case a pomegranate, a fruit already rich in connotation – visually takes the place of human genitalia.

The Vanitas oil paintings take up similar ideas in different guises. Whereas Dutch Vanitas paintings make obvious references to time’s passing by depicting a clock or human skull, or more subtle ones such as a vase of cut flowers or a burning or recently snuffed candle, Clemente’s Vanitas images seem to come from somewhere else. Though they employ recognisable subjects, they are not realistic; they do not partake of realistic spaces or even classical perspective. In Prophesy, a shirt and pair of shorts hang from clotheslines – clothing devoid of human presence but inflated by a breeze that is also pushing the cloud seen at the top of the image. This breeze is a visual / verbal reference to the root of the word ‘spirit,’ which comes from the Latin word for breath. As in medieval poetry, the physical is empty, the spiritual full. Serenity is one of a group of works that make use of house of cards imagery to suggest the instability of life and also the significance of chance (which card will turn up?), as well as an interest in the deeper meanings of common symbols (the diamond, the spade, the club). Four clouds float in animated gestures that suggest angels or other ethereal beings. Equanimity is a tantalising image, a boat filling with water in the foreground suggesting a smiling mouth, while books or newspapers fly against a wall and land on the surface of the water, which suddenly appears to be a solid floor. The palette in all three paintings is muted, a range of pale greys and blues far removed from the hot reds of the 1999 series of Butterfly paintings that were the latest paintings in the Guggenheim exhibition.

All the recent works so far discussed are square in format, perhaps another indication of a desire by the artist to lend his paintings a sense of balance. His earlier explorations of sexual desire or psychological instability resulted in canvases of diverse formats and impastoed surfaces, while these new paintings, with their presence as detached meditations, adopt balanced formats in reduced palettes.

In 2001, Clemente did a series of paintings in grisaille, further reducing his range of colour, though tonally they are extremely rich. The imagery of these works is sometimes sombre, sometimes not, but it is not as coolly contemplative as the Vanitas paintings. It seems to return – in a physical sense, with hints of landscape – to a geographical and spiritual region that has nourished him since he began painting, that of the diverse cultures of south-eastern India. The four grisaille paintings in the current exhibition all depict trees. She-Tree’s odd image of a tree with a skirt actually comes from a tribal ritual in which the palm tree is dressed as a woman, the palm being considered the ideal companion, as its fruit is thirst-quenching and life-giving. Against its almost blank background, the shapes of the tree, with set of hanging prayer beads, take on surreal overtones. Oriental Tree picks up an image – the heart pierced by an arrow – that has become part of Clemente’s vocabulary. Ostensibly the symbol of someone in love, in Clemente’s paintings, perhaps because of the physicality of the phallic arrows, the hearts seem sexually penetrated rather than lightly pricked, and the implication seems to be of broken rather than enamoured hearts – here hanging from what can be considered the tree of life. Dialogue depicts two groups of birds – one, painted fluidly, apparently pecking at insects in wispy tree branches, the other lying dead in a Roman sarcophagus. Five Steps is the most evocative of the group, with its stairway leading up to a doorway in the base of a massive tree, from whose branches hang delicately depicted keys. While the tree remains slightly murky, and the sky behind it is even less defined, the keys seem to shine as with a divine glow.

Another series of paintings from 2001 uses a square format but moves from cool back into a primordial sense of heat. Clemente relates these works to the Zen Koans, which have been described as ‘public records’. The Lin-chi master Chung-fêng Ming-pên (1263 - 1323) wrote,

The koans do not represent the private opinion of a single man, but rather the highest principle, received alike by us and by the hundreds and thousands of bodhisattvas of the three realms and the ten directions. This principle accords with the spiritual source, tallies with the mysterious meaning, destroys birth-and-death, and transcends the passions. It cannot be understood by logic; it cannot be transmitted in words; it cannot be explained in writing; it cannot be measured by reason. It is like the poisoned drum that kills all who hear it, or like a great fire that consumes all who come near it... Through it the intention of the patriarchs is made abundantly clear, the Buddha-mind is laid open and revealed. For the essentials of complete transcendence, final emancipation, total penetration, and identical attainment, nothing can surpass the koan.

The goal of Zen has been described as seeing into one’s own nature, and Zen masters use, among other techniques, certain packed phrases that can seem meaningless to the non-initiate but which, for the person in the right frame of mind at the correct moment, can unlock a door to untold psychic perception and well-being. ‘He doesn’t recognise the smell of his own dung’ is one example and ‘To gouge out healthy flesh and make a wound’ another. Clemente’s 2001 Koan paintings can be seen in the light of these dense sentences. He has composed tightly woven images that can explode with hidden intensity. Pillow of Thorns is one of those Clemente paintings that dazzles by its dimensional illusion. The complexity of the composition is ratcheted up by the masterful use of what appear to be shadows on a flat surface, as though this thorn-pillow were propped against a nearby wall. Blake’s Mind takes up a cosmological interest seen in earlier works such as the 1998 painting Circle, whose looming moon has a similar effect, though surface details are different. The current moon derives from a Blake image from his Song of Los (Copy F Plate 1, colour print Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich), in which the figure bows in prayer or resignation beneath a huge globe. Heart’s Cave is a heart in the form of a honey-comb, whose regular cells give way to dripping sweetness. The final piece in the series, She-Snake, is a surprise, not only because it appears to depict a large erection but because that form is depicted in the textures of lace, hinting at the illicit pleasures of cross-dressing and creating a tension in its confusion of traditional western male and female roles.

In late 2001 into 2002, Clemente did a series of paintings in diverse formats that together form a major statement. He took up favoured motifs, as in House of Cards, developing them formally and compositionally, while creating other work that looked unprecedented, such as Something I Heard, with its motif of little feet balanced on top of big feet. This piece relates to the Vanitas paintings in its reductivism – a simple palette, which highlights the red on the small toenails, and great attention paid to shifts in the background tones, particularly the pregnant transition from light to dark. Of Honey and Salt, the painter says, ‘The heart [of Heart’s Cave] has become the eyes. We don’t know if the tear is salty or sweet. The face is washed away. Only the eyes are left.’  The eyes are missing in New York After Hours, with its two proffered masks, recalling commedia dell’arte, and seeming to stand in for the idea of a couple. The image took its inspiration from a Watteau drawing, and in Clemente’s hands one senses the idea of the persona as a mask for one’s actual nature. House of Cards plays with a different, and more esoteric, tradition, that of alchemy, which has had a significant following throughout history, including such thinkers as Roger Bacon and Isaac Newton. Clemente points out that white, black and red are the central alchemic colours and also those of the Trantric belief system. ‘Playing cards,’ he explains, ‘have the palette of soul transmutation.’ Pietà is an oval painting that brings together emotion and detachment in the same work. The face of the Virgin (or is it Christ, her halo his crown of thorns?) cries over an unfolded drawing on paper of a sleeping baby with an odd construction beneath him. The Virgin cries for the death of her son; the Son cries for humanity.

The most recent paintings, from 2003, also in square formats, show the artist again moving in different directions. Black, White and Red takes up a Clementian Vanitas theme, the cracked vessel; in this case the vessel is intact, but the vivid hammer lying below suggests at least the possibility if not the inevitability (the curtains are parting for what action?) that the delicate glass will soon be smashed. Formally, Anima Mundi is similar, with its vertical thrust. Here, the emphasis is not so much Vanitas as the mundanity of killing and hunger. What is significant is that the cat has passed up the domestic bowl of milk for the thrill of the outside hunt. The whole scene is witnessed by an unidentified third party, through a decorative keyhole. Rizoma has illusionsitic spikes going into and coming out of eyes that seem like abstracted interpretations on sheets of paper stuck to a wall. The use of spikes, and their penetration of the body, brings to mind the passion of Christ, and Rizoma combines with Pillow of Thorns and Pietà to form a resonant body of work that alludes both to the Buddhist concept that life is suffering and to the Christian belief that through the suffering of one man (Christ) can come salvation for others.

‘It can’t be swallowed, it can’t be spit out’: another Zen tipping phrase (to tip the psychic balance). A slight misreading would produce, ‘If it can’t be swallowed, it can’t be spit out,’ a more Graeco-Latin kind of humour. Clemente has been drawn to Latin America, to Afghanistan, to Madras. He has lived in Naples, Rome, and New York. These days, one feels, among all these allures, the great pull for Clemente of the eternal city, where the hills push up and propel so many centuries of human experience that it would seem impolite not to be endlessly dazzled. Except that the exigencies of daily life draw one back. A quick coffee standing up in a bar, where it is always good, no matter you have never entered there before. This is Rome, a city in which Clemente has spent several lives. As he once observed, ‘Walking through Rome, you find big mouths vomiting water and teenagers holding big fishes and groups of wet bodies. These are baroque fountains. They are as deliberately erotic as a machine can be.’

Europeans who have moved to New York never get tired of the apartment lights.They see the city with a tenderness Americans can rarely manage Of his adopted home, Clemente once wrote,

            The light of New York is a reflected light... Few are given this gift: to rest in a                         restless city, where the absence of memory leaves no occasion of hope, and to                         fulfil one’s desire for an hour is perceived as an experience of redemption... Few                         have been able to consume this restlessness, take it with irony and tenderness,                         thrive on it in a cosmopolitan and civil way. Let it go without losing it, saving                         what was precious to save...

Clemente’s deep relationship to contemporary poetry, and particularly to certain contemporary American poets, was part of the reason he moved to New York City in 1981 – to be among the painters, poets and musicians (not to mention the intriguing non-artists) centred there. One may observe a back-and-forth between Clemente’s interests in cultures and philosophies from diverse times and places and his need to be rooted in the present tense, in relationship to the artists of his time, and their foundation in the recent past. Poetry can be found firsthand in books, though it lacks there an essential aural component. Visual art, and the present culture of people, can be thought about and introduced in books, but must be ultimately experienced face to face. As he has explored mystical and alchemical traditions in his art, and has exercised ways of looking at the world not defined by the Judaeo-Christian world view, he has been physically drawn to places and people who present choices not in the mainstream.

Mysticism is something that to many seems not on equal footing with established religions and dominant philosophies. The scholar Jeffrey Kripal writes of mysticism in a way that has direct relevance to Clemente’s concerns:

            Etymologically speaking, the mystical (mustikon) is quite literally ‘the secret,’ ‘the hidden.’ Although it is certainly filled with its own secrets, perhaps one of the defining features of the mystical life is its collapsing of the inside and the             outside, a kind of fusion or boundary crossing that recognises no ultimate differentiation from the rest of the universe, be it naturally or culturally defined... There can be no secrets in deep communion or unity, for a secret demands at least two separated selves. On this level, at least, the mystical is a kind of complete and troubling, even scandalous transparency.

Everything about Clemente has a slightly mythic feel to it, which is totally in place and harmonious. But deeper in, one suspects, Clemente is truly a mystic, in the technical sense, that there is something hidden he won’t, or can’t, reveal – his true belief, his own nature.

Vincent Katz is a poet, translator, curator and critic. He edited Black Mountain College: Experiment In Art (2002) and has recently published essays on the work of Cy Twombly, Beat Streuli, Alex Katz and Philip Taaffe.