A global traveler,
Francesco Clemente has made several extended trips to Brazil, where he studied
Candomblé, a pantheistic religion that came from West Africa in the sixteenth
century by means of the international slave trade. Still practiced today,
Candomblé venerates the forces of nature. With Prosperity, Clemente draws on the iconography of Candomblé to
express his own beliefs in mystical renewal. Three orixás, or deities, are presented in an altar-like tableau:
Iemanjá, the blue goddess of the ocean;
Oxóssi, the green god of the forest and the hunt; and Oxum, the golden goddess
of calm water.