19 Quotes by Francesco Clemente

Painting is like making love. You cannot ask, ‘How do you do it?’ But, hopefully, it is beautiful.

Maybe poets express more directly a sense of sympathy for other human beings. Painting is a little bit more of a retreat from human beings in real life; painting is more about the extreme moments when speech doesn’t help anymore.

In my head I am in one of those Buddhist caves where you see a thousand Buddha faces on the wall. In my head I am on my seventeen-year-old acid trip, when I saw my personas fall one minute after another, as if I was dying every moment.

And dilettantism is a humorous way to survive. Everybody understands you for it and everybody hates you for it. And not everybody chooses to be a dilettante. Many choose cunning and brute force.

There’s poetry in the world. Poetry doesn’t belong just to the poets. You know, you can look at the most premeditated, cold blooded movie and find poetry in it.

If you want to compete in Italy, the only accepted ways are brute force, or cunning. Like Machiavelli says, “Fronte otra forze.” And neither of these two “virtues” is suited to an artist. The artist has to stay intelligent.

A photograph to me is always a reminder of how the person was on a certain day in that certain light fixed. When I look at a watercolor of that same person, it seems to me alive, more open than a photograph.

When I look at a drawing of a person, I look at that person as living.

I first think of intelligence. You need it for surviving in Italy because Italy is so pompous.