Elena Climent
Re-encounters

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Ordering Objects: Acts of Time
Sarah M. Lowe

Elena Climent's delicate, evocative still lifes - pictures of accumulated objects she painstakingly collects, arranges and reproduces - may be seen as performances, that is, as representations of the act of ordering. Climent is exceptionally deliberate about precisely what objects appear in her work, despite the seemingly vast array of things that populate her canvases. Her willful selection is the subject of her art: vases, candles, books, dolls, plants, birds, fruit, keys, photographs, letters, and the detritus of everyday life at the end of the twentieth century, all hold meaning for the artist.

10. Red Devil with Broken
Angel, 1994

For Climent, her paintings "symbolize feelings through objects" and she thinks of them as stories, and although the viewer is not necessarily cognizant of the specific narrative she has in mind, the intense realism of her formal style and the sheer accumulation of "facts" are riveting. We scrutinize these dazzling, detailed, and tightly painted still lifes for clues, messages, meanings. The evocation of the mystical in works such as Red Devil with Broken Angel and Catalogue of Bosch, as well as their small size, reveals their lineage from the Mexican ex-voto. A paraphrase of Diego Rivera's observation regarding the subject matter of the retablo is eminently applicable to Climent's work: miraculous events are made ordinary and everyday things are turned into miracles.

Climent is motivated by the acute knowledge that things from her past have been lost to her, and that through the act of reproducing her inheritance she can claim it for herself. Never far from her mind is the idea of heritage, of coming to terms with who she is. This decidedly Mexican pre-occupation is evident especially in the vanguard movements in the early part of this century. In rejecting European influences, the artists of the Mexican mural movement and the Estridentistas (Mexico's answer to the Futurists) self-consciously sought to advance a specifically Mexican art, and in so doing, they honored the multi-racial ancestry that is the heritage of virtually all Mexicans.

Kitchen with Black Candle, 1994

Climent's search is not quite as literal as that of her Mexican progenitors. Rather, her paintings now emanate the poignancy of the expatriate, in part because she is no longer living in Mexico where she was born and raised, the daughter of two exiles (her mother was an American Jew and her father a Spanish liberal). After six years of living in New York City, there are noticeable if subtle changes in Climent's work. Mexican middle-class household scenes of a family's altar with a tattered reproduction of the Virgin of Guadalupe or a kitchen shelf stacked with packaged foods were predominant in her work before leaving Mexico. Unequivocally antifolkloric, her pictures were, nevertheless, reminders of her childhood and were steeped in a nostalgia for a past at odds with the standards of "good taste" which was part of her upbringing and which she was expected to uphold. Once abroad, Climent continued this theme, painting from photographs she had taken during visits home. Often she copied a casual snapshot completely or took it as a setting to structure items she imported from Mexico such as votive candles and brightly colored plastic tablecloths.

With the recent death of her mother, Climent's exploration and forging of her own history have taken a more dominant place as a subject of her art. In her current work, the domestic sites and altars are no longer anonymous: Kitchen with Black Candle , for example, is a scene of her mother's kitchen. Climent has also been painting still lifes that she creates in her studio with items chosen specifically for their associations. These objects, with their personal meanings, inevitably carry with them the sign of time. A particular object recalls its owner and echoes its previous existence; it has a history and so bridges the present with the past. In Flowers with Wristwatch , the watch, with it's unavoidable reference to the passage of time, twists as if energized by the memory of its owner (her mother). The bookshelves in Bookshelf hold a wealth of information that has been carefully choreographed by the artist to create a modern vanitas painting. A photograph of Climent as a young girl watches over the action figures that belong to her own son, while the lower shelf holds two memento mori (literally, a reminder of death). The traditional skull is replaced with a paper skeleton, a typical Mexican artifact, and the hourglass becomes a battery-run clock.

The presence of Mexico in some of Climent's recent paintings has altered and become, in a sense, more conceptional. Several still lifes, Three Cactus Plants and Flowers with Wristwatch , for example, include envelopes edged in green, red, and white, that is, letters sent from home by friends and family. These trompe-l'oeil letters signify their foreign origins, and they recall the faithful transcriptions of two dimensional objects in the work of American nineteenth century painters William Harnett and John Frederick Peto. Climent, like them, constructs her still lifes in shallow spaces, thus accentuating the illusionism of the work and creating an intimacy that further intensifies her work.

Bookshelf, 1994

Photographs too, are more evident in her current work and also speak to her past, to her legacy. Climent is especially challenged by trying to reproduce photographs in her work, but she has always pushed herself to conquer the formal rules of anatomy, perspective, composition and color. Much of her training was selfimposed: she copied works of art, imitated artists, studied anatomy in books, sketched obsessively, visited museums, experimented with color, and in the end, taught herself these very techniques that were regarded with suspicion by artists of her generation. Her father, also an artist, discouraged her from attending art school, fearing a traditional education would do more harm than good. Thus while the younger Climent is virtually self-taught, her isolation created an anxiety about what she might be missing; by overcoming the technical hurdles, she is now allowed the freedom to reproduce what she sees and express the emotional charge the objects have for her.

Climent's works reverberate with a tension between their emphatic realism and the opacity of their meaning, between knowing they are painted and wanting them to be real, between their anonymity and the implication that their presence is vitally important. Climent thinks of her paintings as "windows on memories" and the viewer never ceases to enjoy the exquisite fissure between perception and comprehension that these paintings arouse.

Sarah M. Lowe, April 1995

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