Moon and Mother

At a recent Sydney Biennale, Francesco Clemente exhibited the Story of My Country , a work that included many small paintings depicting the history of Rome. These images, in the conventional patta style of Orissa, were the work of Orissan artists but collectively bore the signature of Clemente. Clemente was incalcated as a child in the Roman Catholic aesthetic, a preparation that made him fully susceptible to popular Hinduism’s ‘succulent realism’. Clemente vacillates, in a fruitful manner, between a self identity that follows the mother, and one that ‘desperately’ follows the father. Clemente’s rejection of a ‘representational’ approach might be understood as a move away from a positivist Orientalism: the delusion that a totalised reality of India might be captured in an image and transported from India to an audience elsewhere.

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Geography · Orient · Art, Politics, and Modernism · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Photography and Visual Culture