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Elena
Climent |
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Elena
Climent |
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Objects are powerful precipitants of fantasy and feeling, especially when they belong to our parents. After her mother died in August, 1994, the Mexican painter Elena Climent decided to paint all the corners of her childhood home in Colonia Aguilas in Mexico City before strangers moved in and swept its memories away. Her decision was as personal as the series of still lifes that resulted from it. "Throughout my growing years," Climent said, "I cherished my parents’ house and felt a strong link to the mysterious power that impregnated every part of it, attracting me to the secret labyrinths of my origins."1 Her exploration in paint of her parents’ world was an act of love, a struggle for self knowledge and a form of grieving. In another artist’s hands such a subject could have been an exercise in nostalgia. Elena Climent conquered nostalgia by vivifying the present. 22. Table with Ink Pot and Old Photograph, 1996 Her father Enrique Climent, who died in 1980, was a Spanish painter and an exile from the Spanish Civil War. Her American mother, Helen Climent, came from a Brooklyn working-class Jewish family. Their home was different from those of their Mexican friends. It was an exquisite creation, steeped in nostalgia and totally divorced from contemporary life. Her father’s taste dominated every inch of it. "The house was not only a house, it was a symbol of a lost world," Climent said.2 Her father surrounded himself with objects which evoked his homeland. Every thing was perfectly arranged: "matching colors, harmony, composition, symmetry, the light coming 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...."3 Given her parents’ emphasis on beauty and art, it is not surprising that, at the age of sixteen, Elena Climent decided to become a painter. From the beginning she painted interiors. "My paintings have always been windows to another world. They used to be invented; I did not copy reality."4 They were inspired by medieval art and influenced also by her father’s classical and European ideas. Like his paintings, they were "loaded with nostalgia."5 After her father’s death Climent rebelled against the strict aesthetic values upon which she had been reared. She found that these rules inhibited her growth for they had nothing to do with the Mexico in which she lived and which she had decided to make the subject of her art. She now wanted her paintings to affirm the beauty of a Mexico that was industrialized, overpopulated, invaded by Yankee products, and in a state of constant change. "I had to embrace a Mexican identity, to find something that did not come from my family."6 Unlike her parents, she accepted Mexico’s changes: in her view they did not obliterate what was essential in Mexican culture. Thus, Climent eschewed the folkloric objects and open-air market foods that an earlier generation of Mexicans had painted with such affection. Instead of bread straight from the bakery and carried in a straw basket on an Indian woman’s head, she depicted pre-sliced white bread packaged in plastic and sold at a supermarket. She painted soda pop bottles rather than earthenware jugs. Her tomatoes came in cans, and the toys she painted were likely to be plastic Batmans or Barbie dolls. 2. Books with Photos and Reproduction, 1996 It took some time to develop this new approach. "When my father was alive I did not paint in oils. I drew a lot. He had a very strong personality and I couldn’t paint near him. My work changed after he died. I perfected my drawing—first line drawing and then volume drawing. I had a watercolor show in 1984 . Then I stopped showing for a few years while I learned how to paint in oils. In 1988 I had my first show of oil paintings."7 The still lifes that Climent produced in the late 1980s and the first half of the 1990s are set on tables, altars, or in cupboards, and rendered with meticulous realism At first her motifs were emphatically Mexican: "I was painting what I saw in the streets: windows, doors, altars, fair-stands, storefronts. Bright colors that went far beyond the tones and hues of my upbringing. I learned to admire the fabulous visual sensibility of the Mexican people, their aesthetic and practical use of plastic, printed matter, and industrial objects and their ingenuity in dealing with scarcity and lack of control over the environment."8 Her mother and her parents’ friends disapproved of Climent’s new vision. These "vulgar" aspects of Mexico were precisely what her parents had sought to deny by inventing their own ideal and beautiful world. "After my father died, my mother wanted to possess his memory. She was his continuity. She couldn’t accept my work. Every time I achieved something, I felt like a traitor."9 When she began to paint Mexico as she saw it, Climent adopted what she saw as a Mexican genius for arranging things into felicitous compositions. Even the poorest Mexicans take pride in beautifying their homes with plants in old tin cans or flowers in vases that might consist of a coke bottle covered with used gift wrap paper. Piles of fruits or vegetables in markets are perfectly arranged, and on Sundays, children of the humblest families are beautifully dressed. Climent’s sensitivity towards this tender and aesthetic approach to concrete reality was heightened because, as the daughter of two foreigners, she was brought up as something of an outsider. Her father compounded his three daughters’ difficulty in determining who they were by stating, when asked for his nationality or religion, that he was a mammal. Climent and her sisters decided that "the only thing that was clear was that we were Mexican....Being Mexican became very important to us, and we took to this with the determination of a convert."10 In 1988 Elena Climent herself became an expatriate. She moved to New York with her husband who taught anthropology at New York University. After a year in Mexico (1992-1993), she and her husband and two children moved to Chicago in 1995. Living in the United States made Climent see Mexico’s rhythms and light with an even sharper focus, and she has said that her colors became brighter after leaving her native land. 32. Shelf with Purple Wall and Objects, 1997 When Climent visits Mexico she takes numerous photographs which she assembles in notebooks which become visual reference books. She also collects Mexican objects. To compose her emphatically Mexicanist still lifes of the late 1980s and early 1990s, she would set up these toys, packaged foods, religious icons, candles, and garishly patterned vinyl tablecloths, sometimes placing them inside makeshift altars made out of a cardboard box lined with wrapping paper. In the last few years she has not needed to do this, for her command of space is so strong that she can place an object in depth without actually having to see it there. When she began the recent series on her parents’ house, she photographed first the rooms and then every object out of context, so that back in Chicago she could "copy the objects like a dictionary." She also brought a few objects home with her. Sometimes she holds one of these in her hand while she paints it into her picture. By painting her parents’ things out of context and by freely rearranging them to suit her own needs, Climent says she has made the objects lose some of their power. "Its a way of recovering my rightful claim to that house," she says.11 Fearing loss of spontaneity, Climent does not make preparatory drawings. There is a personal motive as well: Climent says that putting things together freely on the canvas is a way of creating emotional unity. "In life I am always trying to bring things together, and when I work, I symbolize this. It may be therapeutic. If I planned a composition before doing it, I’d have to deal with symmetry and harmony, which I don’t. I want to put things together like two magnets which repel each other. They will have unity through the painting language."12 Climent’s ideas for paintings come to her, she says, in an instant. "When I start a painting I already see the image in my head. It’s like a revelation. Then I block in the whole composition very quickly, almost with a suicidal attitude—you just do it. Then comes the endless process of working and you think that you are never going to finish."13 Although her still life arrangements look casual, it is clear that they are as painstakingly arranged as sacramental vessels on an altar. Keeping space shallow makes things seem all the more real and touchable. The spaces between objects are always extremely clear: you can measure with your eyes exactly how far one thing is from another, and you can feel the space behind them. Each motif defines its own particular space and each seems separately conceived. In this Climent resembles a naive painter. Although she is virtually self-taught (her father thought art school would spoil her talent), she is a highly skilled and sophisticated artist. If there is an element of primitivism in the way objects seem to have been separately made right here on the canvas, this may have to do with her use of her photographs of single objects as a source. It also may have to do with Climent’s method of starting from the inside out. "When painting the picture I try to reproduce the process that the object itself underwent in its own creation. For example, if I’m going to paint things in a bag I paint the objects first and then paint the bag around them."14 The precision of placement in these still lifes is comforting: it is as if the world has been put in order by the tidying up of its objects. When her mother died, Climent returned to Mexico and stayed in her childhood home for a week. "I started to roam like a spirit through the house trying to recover something that had been taken away from me. I felt a piece of my soul was trapped in there. By painting the house I was recovering myself. I wanted to be free." In the past, Climent’s search for identity had focused on contradictions produced by her Spanish and American heredity and her Mexican upbringing. Having asserted her Mexicanness in her art, she now went further. She brought her past and present and inside and outside worlds together and tried to make peace among them. "Just being ‘the Mexican woman’ painting Mexican subjects wasn’t enough. I wanted to put all of myself into a painting."15 In her parents’ house she focused on possessions in which she felt their presence. The intensity of emotion—love, anger, loss, longing—projected on these objects gives them a startling vividness. Mexico’s strong Surrealist tradition might also charge her still lifes with this peculiar vitality, but a more important source, I think, is Flemish Renaissance devotional paintings in which everyday things embody symbolic meanings. Climent always takes a close perspective: she paints not houses, but parts of walls, not rooms, but furniture upon which objects have been placed. Things are usually seen from a vantage point a few inches above the surface on which they are arranged. This perspective recalls that of a five or six year old child. Indeed, the fascination for detail with which objects are depicted recalls the excitement and curiosity of a young girl snooping in her mother’s dressing table. Except in photographs and reproductions propped on shelves or pinned on walls in Climent’s still lifes, there are no long vistas. Space ends about as far away as the arm can reach: just behind the still life, our eye butts up against a wall. The feeling of intimate confinement, reinforced by the paintings’ small scale, recalls the way children create secret, enclosed places, fantasy worlds full of their private keepsakes. These worlds are comforting and never claustrophobic because their scale is a fantasy scale that opens into the space of the imagination. Perhaps the feeling of closeness comes from Climent’s enclosure in the home she burrows into, makes art of, and finally escapes. As the child in Climent poked her nose into her parents’ things, and the grieving adult examined these things for what they held of memory, the project began to change. The paintings became less about her parents and more about herself. "The paintings are gradually coming back to the present. I am mixing fantasy with reality. Not all the objects are from my parents’ house. I dare to add things from other parts of my life. For example, I might put one of my daughter’s toys or something of my own into the paintings. Little by little I add more of my identity and even my dream world. It is like returning home after being outside."16 For Climent, inserting her daughter’s plastic dolls or miniature balloons into her parents’ perfectly tasteful house was a way of staking her claim on her family home and on her identity imbedded in it. 4. Dresser with Doll and Old Studio Photograph, 1996 In Dresser with Doll and Old Studio Photograph Climent lovingly depicts a photograph of her father’s former studio, a high-ceilinged room with Spanish-style furniture—a chair with a lute laid on it, a table covered with a tasseled cloth and with a swath of lustrous fabric descending from it. According to Climent, Enrique Climent sent this photograph to her mother when they were courting. He hoped that its romantic atmosphere would persuade her to return to Mexico and to him. Flanking the photograph is a pot of primroses and a cracked and mended antique doll which looks surprised at our intrusion into her world. Like many of the dolls in Climent’s still lifes, she looks helpless and vulnerable and suggests a rather melancholy female presence. Climent has written that her mother was always sad and that she saw life through her husband’s eyes, "learning to create and recreate his world under one creed: my father’s creed."17 The wall behind the table is a sharp, bright, Mexican yellow. Like the bright colored walls in other paintings in this series, this was not the wall’s actual color. In an act of rebellion against her parents’ insistence on ‘tasteful’ sober colors, Climent inserted this yellow into their household. Hanging on the yellow wall, a framed photograph of one of Climent’s sisters as a baby has a curved glass which reflects a large window (her father’s studio window) that would be behind the painter and the viewer. The pocket of deep space created by the photograph and the amplification of space created by the reflected window make for a spatial complexity that recalls Velasquez. On the table, very much within a child’s reach, lies a key and a pile of money placed on top of what must be a shopping list. Keys and money are frequent motifs in Climent’s still lifes. Like her pencils, tooth brushes, letters, wristwatches, paper clips, matches, note pads, and food, they suggest that their owners will soon return. Since this series of paintings has to do with memorializing her parents’ house, these objects have a particular poignancy. They suggest things left undone at death and the way trivial objects, with all their fierce immediacy, are all that remain to record the passage of a life. They also invite our fingers to touch and to take hold, thus creating a powerful physical engagement between painting and viewer. In Climent’s hands the still life becomes a drama involving wit and sorrow, good and evil, life and death. Tabletops and shelves are small theaters. Although there are no figures in these paintings, human presence is felt in the objects as well as in the numerous replicas of figures in the form of dolls, clay figurines, religious statues, and paintings within paintings (some of them invented by Climent to look like her early medievalizing fantasy subjects). There are also numerous family photographs. For years, Climent has painted photographs into her still lifes. Clearly she delights in the scale jumps between the photographic image and the nearby objects. In the paintings that record her childhood home her skill in rendering photographs with small, delicate, light strokes of her tiny brush is astonishing. The snapshots inject a specific moment in time which connects in mysterious ways with the story told in a different kind of time by things. Curiously, the photographs, because they are black and white, shiny and flat, and rather succinctly painted, seem more abstract than the objects which continue to have a concrete existence in the present. 3. Studio Scene with Brushes, 1996 Climent’s family narratives remain elusive. To participate in the story, it is not necessary for the viewer to know why Climent chose to put these objects on her stage. We feel the drama anyway. In Studio Scene with Brushes, the stage is a table in her father’s studio, which Climent says was a kind of sanctuary into which children were forbidden to enter. The studio has been desanctified by the invasion of characters—clowns, devils, a witch, and embracing lovers—that seem to be up to no good. Since Climent’s motifs migrate from picture to picture, several of these characters reappear elsewhere. In other still lifes the narrative is enacted by objects such as a clay and painted chicken confronting each other; a rubber scorpion and a conch placed beside a snapshot of Enrique and Helen Climent; a skeleton dressed in red and a Madonna in a tin shrine. 6. Table with Grapefruit and Old Letter, 1996 The dramatis personae in Table with Grapefruit and Old Letter belong both to the present, indicated by the grapefruit ready to eat and the note ready to read, and the past, indicated by the Mexican clay figurine, the photograph of Helen Climent as a young woman, and an old letter addressed to Enrique Climent and with a Spanish stamp that shows a profile of Franco. The three sources of light—candle, electric lamp, and window—combine and bring together disparate objects and separate moments in time. "I’ve been dealing with the phenomenon of time," says Elena Climent. "The same objects were there in my parents’ house always, so I paint the present object and the timeless one. They are overlapped. I’m thinking about what time means, lineal time in which you go forward in a line, and time in dreams."18 Time has always been a subject in Climent’s still lifes. Worn books, burned down candles, cracked plaster and tiles, and broken things suggest time’s passage. She turned certain earlier paintings into vanitas images by the insertion of candy skulls and toy skeletons. Among the family pictures on the wall in her recent Table with Angel, hangs a Colonial painting depicting a figure that is half beautiful young woman and half skeleton. The legend beneath the figure reads: "Este es el espejo que no te engana" (this is the mirror that does not deceive you). With its floral offering and its votive candles, Table with Angel is a kind of altar painting. Climent says that she painted it to find some resolution in her relationship to her family. "Table with Angel has to do with forgiveness. The angel is very forgiving."19 13. Table with Angel, 1997 In a way, all of Climent’s still lifes are altars. The candles, flowers, and religious images and figurines create an atmosphere of worship. Although she was brought up agnostic, she lived in a Catholic culture, and her paintings have a strong spiritual content. Their reverence for life becomes a kind of devotion. "When I was growing up, being partly Jewish and partly Christian was very difficult for me. My parents broke away from their parents’ religions. I had to invent my own religion. I’m very religious when I paint. I guess I’m hoping that there is a reason for things."20 Climent belongs to the generation of Mexican painters who took their cue from Frida Kahlo in making an art that combined fantasy, intimate feeling, and autobiography. But unlike some of her contemporaries, who try too hard to be self-revealing and original, and who deploy irony to subdue pain, Climent grounds each of her works in concrete reality and immediate feeling. Her mostly small canvases, full of small objects with large meanings, do not take in a broad sweep. Instead they delve deep. Their plunge into Climent’s origins invites each of us to invent and enter worlds that embody our own memories, fantasies, and dreams. New York, 1997 Notes 1.
Elena Climent, unpublished statement, 1995. |
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