Elena Climent
In Search of the Present

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In Search of the Present
Elena Climent

ONE OF THE MOST difficult challenges in my life has been trying to bring together with some common denominator my different backgrounds and the contradictions they produced in my upbringing.

My father was a Spanish artist and an exile from the Spanish Civil War. In 1939 he sailed to Mexico with many others who, like him, were fleeing the new fascist government in Spain. He never saw his parents again, and he saw his siblings only after some 30 years. In Mexico he had to begin a whole new life for himself. He was then 42 years old.

I think that after his first years in Mexico, once the fascination and surprise of this new vast and marvelous country had calmed down, his nostalgia for the world he left behind settled in him forever.

Altar with Blue Tiles, 1992

All throughout the rest of his life-his second life one may call it-he surrounded himself with a universe of his creation, impregnated with fantasies and painful recollections of that lost world which became more and more legendary: the Mediterranean world which he evoked in his surroundings, in his home and in his art. He painted, over and over, his dreams of his Spanish memories, the even-more-remote dreams of other dreams, Spanish dreams, memories from the times of the Arabs, of the times of Mediterranean splendors, a fascination for whichever trace was left of all those long-gone people who travelled from one coast to another selling, buying, trading. Who exactly they were didn't matter, what mattered was the feeling, the flavor, the atmosphere that all that long-time-ago memory was wrapped in and, above all, his love for it and the great pain for its loss.

He painted mostly objects, and when they weren't objects, when they were people or landscapes, he treated them as if they too were objects: ancestral, timeless, immortal, silent and full of secrets never to be known. His objects made you think of those you could find in a burial or in some distant market, at a stand where they sold antiques that have travelled through places and times, no one knows how long or how much, until they arrived at that very place and into your own hands by pure chance.

Mystery and fantasy can help you soothe some of the pain for a loss, and I can imagine how for someone whose life had been cut in two an object can acquire that magic quality of triggering those comforting dreams. Maybe this is why my father surrounded himself with so many of them, why he painted them, and why he could produce that wonderful atmosphere around him, perhaps it is what gave him a feeling of continuity between his two lives. It was a world created from his dreams, from his oldest memories which seemed to be not decades, but centuries old. And it was inside this world of his that I was born.

My mother's past was not a presence like my father's, and she transmitted to us no sweet or magic recollections from her own youth. Her background was completely different. She came from a working class Jewish family of Brooklyn, and her childhood seems to have been very grim. Her mother died early, leaving four young children, and her father had to work very hard and had little time for them. The little my mother would tell us about her childhood I recreated in my mind in a cold and cloudy atmosphere, a sad image produced by my mother's sadness.

She was much younger than my father, and was probably overwhelmed by him. She had abandoned her origins, married out of her faith against her father's will and, as did my own father (for this they did have in common), she wanted to choose her own identity.

The idea of marrying a Spanish artist whom she found distinguished and handsome and whose life-style probably evoked in her that of the European artists that we see photographed in their studios during the first decades of the centuries; black and white photographs of spaces with high ceilings, full of books, paintings on the walls, perhaps an African mask, some ceramics, the artist himself sitting on a couch with pillows made from some ethnic fabric, half of him in the shadow, half in the light that came in through a tall window (at an angle). The artist probably smoking a pipe and looking at a book. How seducing this must have been!

But trying to raise three daughters in a foreign country, in a new language, married to a man of overpowering personality who didn't seem to understand that the world had changed since his childhood, 60 years before, must have been exasperating.

Just getting us to go to school was a struggle because my father didn't see the need; he even questioned the value of learning to read and write. "They can sign their names with an 'X'," he'd say, half joking and half serious.

My mother was also worried about the fact that we were growing up without an identity. She couldn't raise us Jewish or Catholic with my father, who despised any institutionalized belief. He was of Catholic origins, but after his father's efforts to turn him into a priest, he turned out an atheist and would have been a declared anarchist if he weren't so much against being called anything. When asked about his nationality or religion he would declare himself to be a mammal, and refuse to specify any further.

So here we were, the three daughters of two people who came from completely different backgrounds, trying to decide what we were supposed to be. The only thing that was clear was that we were Mexican, because we had been born in Mexico and were being raised there, and to this both of our parents agreed.

Being Mexican became very important to us, and we took to this with the determination of a convert. Sometimes when you aren't quite in the middle of things you have a better perception of your environment and a greater capacity to appreciate it, and this was certainly our case.

But we weren't Mexican like our Mexican neighbors, we were Mexicans who could see things from the outside. Because our home was different from the other homes, and our parents didn't think like the others. They were constantly transgressing social rules and we, as children, were very sensitive to the tensions this caused. I think that this is part of the reason why we became so aware of the codes of behavior around people who surrounded us and learned to deal with them with great ability.

Yellow Kitchen, 1991

We didn't belong to a social class, and at the same time had access to all of them, from the very rich, to the very poor. We could feel quite comfortable in any home and knew just how we were supposed to behave in each one of them. But what we were and where we belonged was not clear. As a matter of fact, we were many things at once: the poor people who lived on the north side of our neighborhood accused us of being rich, white and foreign. To our neighbors from the other side (Mexican conservative upper-middle class Catholics) we were bohemians and Jewish. In the American School, where my mother sent us in spite of my father's complaints, we were poor and Mexican, and had to deal with conflicts that would even lead to violent fights. It was only in the circles of my parents' friends that we were just normal and could feel comfortable. But it was a world that had little future for us, the younger ones. It was based on shared nostalgias, dreams, a taste for wonderful environments that were representations of these dreams of old times, real or not real. It was wonderful. All these homes we visited, where we would all gather for parties, or 'happenings,' as I later called them, were recreations of a perfect world that everyone believed to have existed at some point in their memories. Beauty as seen from a classic point of view; objects carefully organized, matching colors, harmony, composition, symmetry, the light coming in through a certain window at a particular time of day, hitting right on a specific corner of the room in such a way that would remind you of a painting, perhaps a Rembrandt. The background music, the lit fireplace as the heart of everything, someone sitting next to a lamp, drawing. Maybe someone would read a poem, perhaps a musician would entertain us with his music, a friend who could cook would prepare a very special meal for the occasion.

As I grew out of childhood I appreciated this more and more. I loved it, and as a teenager my life was enriched immensely by these countless gatherings of artists, musicians, writers. Those years were full of meaning and artistic inspiration. I decided to become a painter at age 16, and took to this enterprise passionately. When I look back now, I can't help smiling, remembering myself walking in the streets, sighing before every artistic ornament, sighing before paintings, sighing before an old facade, a carved door, and even though now I realize how, in a sense, my artistic boundaries were constrained, I think it was wonderful and I'm grateful for having lived through such an experience.

In these times, when one of our biggest enemies is the feeling of senselessness, of void, of a general categorical disbelief for anything that we can't explain, of the overvaluation of the intellectual over the sensitive, I consider myself to be very lucky to have grown up in an environment where things were flooded with meaning and feeling. Even though it was a world that could nurture me only until a certain point, it was crucial during my first and most vulnerable years as an artist.

Later on, it became too constrained, because it fed on the past and therefore could not offer me a place in my own future, as a full grown person. Like a baby inside a mother's womb, there had to come a point where I could fit inside no longer and would have to be born into my own self. And this was one of the most painful and frightening experiences I've ever had.

Leaving this safe, appealing, warm, beautiful existence, where things made perfect sense and where I could understand the rules of the game to go out into the vast, ugly, confusing world that had always surrounded our fortresses, our oasis, and to look there for some new reason to create, to develop an identity of my own seemed like an almost impossible quest.

Besides, from the point of view of the people from within, this was a completely senseless and ridiculous need, and even perhaps a bit of a betrayal. How could I, who had been brought up in this wonderful environment, with the best aesthetic values, with good taste, fall into this attraction for vulgar things?

But I did not find them vulgar. After a long process of looking, searching, of roaming around the city without knowing what to look for, I suddenly learned to see in a new way. It took me a long time to understand that I couldn't expect to find an answer within the aesthetic rules that I had originally been taught. Until then everything that I drew (for at the time I was more of a draftswoman than a painter) had a very strong influence of this mixture of classic, renaissance, timeless flavor. Whenever I looked for inspiration I had to withdraw from reality and go into an inward spiral, searching within my feelings, my dreams, my fantasies, and those of my parents and my parents' friends.

I do not regret having been like this. I feel that nowadays I can still benefit from that capacity which can at some points be very enriching. But at that time I definitely needed new motivations to create outside myself and outside the artistic world I had been brought up in.

In those years, when I was in this stage, I retired temporarily from the art world to change techniques, from drawing to painting. I did some travelling in Mexico, inside and outside the city, and I looked everywhere in all directions, trying to absorb as much as I could. I wanted to store images in my memory and do something with them.

I must have been very well disposed and ready to perceive things in a certain way, when one night, while driving through a poor neighborhood, I saw a grey brick house in the darkness with a window that had a curtain of brilliant colors: pink with blue flowers. With the light shining from inside the house it looked like a movie screen. This vision hit me so hard that, once back home, I tried to make a painting of it.

This was my first painting in a series that I later called "Flor de Asfalto" (Asphalt Flower). This new style turned out to be an answer for what I had been searching. I had finally found a new way to see that gave a new sense to my surroundings, and with this new way of seeing, I discovered more and more sources of inspiration. Slowly, I learned to understand better what it all meant, in a way how it worked, both in the landscapes and in the interior scenes.

If you judge a place like Mexico City with classic values of order, symmetry, control of proportions, then you won't like the results. You will only see disorder, chaos, and ugliness everywhere.

In order to understand such an environment you have to change your visual and aesthetic codes. First of all, you can't see it as something static. The urban Mexican landscape is in constant change and it is in this process where you can find its interest and beauty.

When we look at, let's say, Venice (or even more so the Venice of Canaletto), you will see a landscape that was created to last and to stay the way it was. It is there, before you, easy to understand, logical, orderly, symmetrical. The city was created-like the painting of the city was created-to be appreciated from certain angles. As a spectator, you don't need it and you don't want it to change. In a way, this wonderful landscape was planned to its completion.

Mexico City is a very different story. To understand how it looks you need to see it in its process of eternal change. Like crystals growing on each other, every new element in Mexico City will appear already transformed by other former elements and it will have a decisive influence in the next ones to come.

A home is built in a newly colonized neighborhood. Then, perhaps a few years later, will come the pavement and the sidewalk. The sidewalk happens to be higher than the house entrance, and it will cover a good part of it. The owners of the house will then add inside steps improvised with big rocks to be able to enter the house comfortably. A few houses further down, the sidewalk is too low for the entrance doors, and so the steps will be added on the outside. The awkward spaces left by the new sidewalk and its capricious layout will be filled in perhaps by plants inside cans, even by an altar, if a generous enough space is created. Anything is possible, as new spaces are constantly being created by the randomness of urban growth. A window pane is broken; it will be replaced by some piece of glass-perhaps a different type of glass-a bathroom glass, a colored glass, and eventually, after more replacements have been done, the window will acquire the appearance of a collage. The door: while waiting to buy a brand-new iron door, a provisional one will be built out of pieces of boards, of a tin sheet, of an old propaganda poster printed on some resistant material. Plant pots: anything can be a plant pot. A row of identical supermarket bags filled with soil with geraniums growing inside can decorate the top of a wall that is waiting to be further amplified when more bricks become available. The waiting can be long, and when its time is due, another waiting period will have begun for some other improvement.

And so goes the story of Mexico City, a big story made from millions of individual stories, of endless alterations of space, amplifications, divisions, ingenious solutions for problems that no one else will solve. It is a very dramatic and moving story and, as such, it must be understood in its own way.

So this was my breaking out from the closed aesthetic world I had been brought up in. I knew I would never be able to get rid of all of the traits it left in me, and I didn't want to, either. As I said in the beginning of this article, one of my challenges has been to bring it all together, my inside and outside world. Maybe the common denominator I have been looking for is art itself, where we are all elevated into the same search from transcendence, and where we are all equal.

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