CURA.

The last survey of Francesco Clemente’s work at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, Anima Nomade, gathers a selection of big-scale works from the last decade: the series of the Flags – The Society of Spectacle (2014), the site-specific intervention of the Wall Paintings – Ocean of Stories (2024), and six Tents (2013-14).

The multitude of symbols and references drawn from the various cultural geographies the artist has traversed throughout his life forms the common ground of the exhibited works, which resonate as an organic ensemble. No place is too remote or too familiar, as different images blend into one another. It is as if Clemente seeks to reveal, through a profound excavation, that the depths of diverse latitudes ultimately converge on the same core—a spiritual unity connecting individuals and their mythologies. What the artist chases is, one could say, a vertical tension of art, which stretches from the unknown deepness of the earth to the highest elevations of the spirit.

In this frame, the Tents remain the quintessential nomadic structures, able to be pinched in any spatial coordinate without losing their intimate sacredness, which places them between a home and a sanctuary. Clemente defines this series as an example of pittura abitabile—inhabitable painting—suggesting how, in his conception, painting belongs to the body rather than just to the eyes. Upon entering the suspended atmosphere of the tents, the human body serves as a vehicle of transcendence and a bearer of forces that activate through mutual exchange with the surrounding environment.

For the artist, the tents function as movable chapels or museums, shedding the stasis of Western architecture to become light, floating, and ephemeral. Their purpose remains fluid, embracing an openness given by the epiphanic presence of the image. In this form, painting reclaims the primal power it once held in prehistoric caves and churches—spaces of both shelter and devotion, as in the Taking Refuge Tent, where theriomorphic figures emerge from the semi-darkness of the fabric walls.