Jack Clemente Biography
Born in Novara in 1926 to an Italian father and an Irish mother, he studied literature and philosophy in his hometown, wrote poetry and painted. He had his first contacts with his friend Edoardo Sanguineti. Since 1952 he has been in Paris and frequents the cultural environment of the French capital, friend of, among others, Foujita, Michaux, Corneille, Arnal. In 1953 he held his first solo exhibition at the Galerie de la Muette in Paris with a production influenced by Van Dongen's expressionist figuration; he participated in the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in July/August 1955 and at the same time maintained relations with Italy. In particular he met Guido Le Noci, director of the Galleria Apollinaire who invited him to exhibit in Milan in a solo show in February 1956 presented by Jacqueline Matisse: his pictorial production moved between lyrical abstraction and an informal material satisfaction. Frequent participations in Italian group exhibitions: in June of the same year he took part in the exhibition "Masters and young painters of today" at the Apollinaire Gallery and, as a representative of French painting, he was invited to two editions of the Lissone Prize, in 1955 and 1957, always curated by Le Noci. In October of that year he exhibited in Milan in the "Collective 15 young painters" at the Galleria Blu (with Baj, Bertini, Scanavino, Crippa, Dova) and in 1958 he came into contact with Carlo Cardazzo and Lucio Fontana, approaching the protagonists of Spatialism. The works of these years are created with material thicknesses and appear as mineral concretions that the artist defines as “Floraisons minérales”. In 1958 he held an important exhibition at the Drian Gallery in London where he also exhibited in January 1959; at the same time he is at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London with Fontana, Dova, Crippa, in the exhibition dedicated to the Damiano collection presented by Lawrence Alloway. While his international participations multiplied both with personal exhibitions (Colette Allendy, Paris; Galerie In recent years there was a further renewal and from increasingly rigorous and geometric scans in 1968 he began to use "other" materials compared to the painting, such as rope and jute. The last personal exhibition in 1972 was held at the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan. In 1969 he began a collaboration with French and German Television and created a series of films on the protagonists of painting and art. music Averty's assistant, his first film was “Pink Floyd in Pompeii” which was followed, as an independent director, by “Balla e il Futurismo” (1972) winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale of that year and. of the prize at the 1st Asolo International Art Film Festival. Again for French television he made "D'Annunzio and D'Annunzio" while his last film "Rauschenberg and Pop Art" was not completed due to the illness he had suffered. , will be completed by his friend Rauschenberg. He died in Milan in 1974. His works can be found in European and American collections including Levine, Monnier, Magliano, Rotschild and Boschi in Milan as well as in public museums such as the Tate Gallery in London, the Museum of Modern Art in Strasbourg and the Mart of Rovereto.
