Mary-Anne Martin/Fine Art | Exhibitions | Climent Search of the Present

Elena Climent
In Search of the Present

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Elena Climent: Recent Paintings
Edward J. Sullivan

FOR ANYONE FAMILIAR with daily life as it is lived in Mexico City, the paintings of Elena Climent produce an instant shock of recognition. This is not to say that she depicts any of the famous "monuments" of the city. Nor does she present us with anything that could be called (touristically speaking) "typical." There are no market vendors or watermelons in her paintings. What she describes (in a true but never photo-realistic way) is the interior structure of the life of middle class Mexicans. We virtually never see their faces; we only perceive them through the things they leave behind-on kitchen tables, on pantry shelves, in the niches where Christmas creches are set up or in the intimacy of the bed and dressing room. Climent's paintings palpitate with life or, rather, are redolent with the warmth of the existence of people who never consciously do anything "artistic" but whose everyday behavior (the way they set a table, arrange a store window or decorate a home altar) evidences an innate reverence for the appearance, shape and color of things. Climent paints simple objects but she does not glorify or dignify them. There is an intensely personal alliance between the artist and the things she records on her canvases. She is happy and at ease with what she paints and the act of registering these objects gives her intense pleasure. Indeed, one can almost sense that if the viewer is pleased with them their creator would be happy but it would not necessarily pain her if the things she paints were to be dismissed as "unimportant" by someone.

Elena Climent's work might almost be called "anti-nostalgic." The kitchen pots and pans she paints are more likely to be made out of plastic than earthenware. The children's toys that clutter her vitrines are not the fanciful animals or traditional dolls that we might see in paintings by Rivera or Maria lzquierdo. They are cheaply made recreations of television wrestling heroes or knock-off varieties of American Barbie dolls. A shelf painted by Climent might contain a chromo-lithograph of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Santo Nińo de Atocha alongside a can of hairspray or a shocking pink lipstick. It is what these objects say about life today in a specific place-as well as the natural affinities of their shapes and colors that fascinates this gifted artist.

Alacena

Kitchen Cupboard, 1991

Elena Climent's art developed in a climate of insecurity, in an age of conundra. Mexican artists of the 1970's were attempting to come to grips with the changes that the late 60's had brought to society. Their artistic expressions, maturing in the 1980's, sought originality without conformity to imported values or prototypes. While they did not want to revive the past they could not wholly reject it as had the generation of painters and sculptors before them. Yet the models of an earlier time seemed insufficient to express the anxiety of the present. Things were no longer pretty. Space was no longer limitless-public squares appeared smaller and smaller and the places people lived and gathered together seemed to he ever more reduced in scale. Past reflections of daily life in Mexico could not possibly be recreated-the times and places represented in the art of the painters of the 30's and 40's had become the substance of myth and legend. Contemporary life left little room for legend-even if their vocabulary were based on the language of the telenovella. What Elena Climent has been able to do so well is to create alternatives for herself. Just as she is a basically selftaught artist she has fashioned her own private strategies for dealing with the past and present. Her visual language is unique. It does not contain the ironies, sarcasm or despair of many painters of her generation. She accepts the reality she finds, internalizes it and makes it into a realm of her own. For the past several years Climent has lived in New York. The distance between her physical surroundings and the places in Mexico that she paints has added an even deeper dimension of thoughtfulness and sobriety to her work. Places and moments are crystallized into frozen drops of time. They are looked at and analyzed by the artist in order to extract from them their essential qualities. Far away from Mexico City Climent is able to objectify the artifacts of middle-class life which she recreates. This distance helps to divorce any hints of sentimentality from her pictorial scrutiny. Her subjects are never depicted as fetishes of modern life but simply as its signifiers.

Elena Climent's paintings are also, in a curious way, about power. When speaking of "power;" I do not mean the power of domination and control but the power of self assurance and personal strength. There is a particular potency to these representations of what is specifically, in many cases, a woman's domestic reality. The kitchen, dressing room or child's bedroom are some of the principal settings for her paintings. Her art depicts the locus of female presence. While there is often a nonchalance to the places and things in her work there is, at the same time, a sobering gravity to the inner life of these objects and what they tell us about the persons with whom they are associated. In Elena Climent's work there is a rare honesty and openness infrequently encountered in art today.

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