http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/28/arts/design/francesco-clemente-offers-contrasting-shows.html 2014-11-27 23:34:55 Francesco Clemente Offers Contrasting Shows “Two Tents,” Francesco Clemente’s show at the Mary Boone Gallery, portrays a kind of heaven with hard benches and a hell with busy bees. === The nomadic Neo-Expressionist painter Francesco Clemente is back, with two concurrent but very different shows: a spare, almost monastic solo show at the Although he distinguishes between an “Angels’ Tent” and a “Devil’s Tent,” Mr. Clemente does not go for easy binaries. The winged figures in the “Angels’ Tent” are strangely indolent; they recline on hard wooden beds, with umbrellas to shield them from blazing, multicolored suns. And although all sorts of mischief is afoot in the “Devil’s Tent,” where top-hatted and monocled banker types puff on cigars and dominate naked men and women, the presence of bees buzzing around a honeycomb lends an air of festive productivity. The pink and blue tent exteriors, with camouflage motifs painted and embellished by craftspeople in Jodhpur, India, are just as striking. And the watercolors on handmade paper, in the back room, offer more in the way of color and pattern and polymorphous spirituality.