In your Berlin show at Blain|Southern you are showing three cotton tents. First used as dwellings over 3000 years ago, tents present an environment of shelter that can be traced back to antiquity. What inspired you to produce these tent paintings?

I wouldn’t call these tent paintings. They are actual Tents, every detail of them, the walls, the roof, the scallops, the pole covers, every part of them but the ropes and the weights, has been painted to make them into a whole.The Tents are my cave paintings, paintings that can be lived in, inhabited, visited, paintings as shelter, paintings that can be folded, crumpled, walked on, paintings as movable chapels or temples, paintings to sleep in, make love in, paintings to rest in and daydream in.

Each of the tents immerses the viewer in a colour-infused environment that seems to mix countless cultural and art historical references…

I am interested by the overlapping of meanings, the discontinuity of context, the constant migration of the Sacred through different mediums as it attempts to survive the mechanical age we live in.

My ‘Museum Tent’ for example, is the most playful one of the three. It contains a collection of emblematic self-portraits, framed by ornate rococo’ frames. The ceiling is cream white with fine block prints and contrasts with the colourful walls. The exterior has a grisaille camouflage, interrupted by ochre and umber ovals, depicting my favourite and maybe some my least favourite museums.

Another Tent depicts Buddhas in meditation. Each Buddha has the head of an animal, either a predator or a prey, raising the question: when the moment of communal quiet will end, will every one return to their given nature or not? The exterior bears the inscription, fragmented and interrupted, and hand stitched back together in a Rajasthani village, of the Vajrayana vow of taking refuge.

Being produced in India, how might the tents embody your relationship with the country?!

My debt to India cannot be overstated. But rather than embody my relation with a particular place, the Tents embody my desire to not belong, and to embrace a nomadic condition, which best expresses the values I believe in.

Francesco Clemente – Tents is on show until Novemver 11, 2013 at Blain|Southern Berlin, Potsdamer Straße 77-87, 10785 Berlin

 ….

  ….

  ….