Elena Climent--The Substance of Our Days

Caleb Ives Bach

To enter the home of Mexican painter Elena Climent feels like stepping into one of the artist’s paintings. I visited her in February, pummeled by the incessant snows of winter in Chicago where she now lives, but upon crossing the threshold of her apartment, warm, moist breezes of her native land began to blow. In a physical sense, steam radiators and a welcoming cup of coffee were responsible but my emotional thermometer rose upon spotting everywhere the actual papier-mâché skeletons, puppets, and articulated muñecas, also vintage toys, polychromed santitos, and other popular artifacts found in her paintings. Dried and fresh flowers, plants in every corner, and vines carefully trained along the walls reinforced the feeling of more temperate climes, but most evocative of her homeland was a series of 19th century lottery cards replicated upon kitchen cupboard doors. Climent, friendly, informal, thoughtful, immediately confessed she is ruled by urgent impulses: to feel is to paint. “I wanted to decorate the kitchen cabinets. I was inspired by some photos I found in an issue of Artes de Mexico devoted to games of chance.”

From the outset Climent reveals herself as an acutely sensitized visual scavenger, an artist who creates highly personalized realities by combining bits of places where she lives, has lived or even hopes to live with meticulous replications of books, photographs, or other objects associated with events or relationships in her life. Although each item carries a specific emotional load for Climent—it’s the propellant that compels her to reproduce them—her paintings speak about experiences common to most people, hence they provoke an immediate, visceral response. “Do you think we are what we have,” I ask ingenuously. “Not exactly,” she responds. “But I think wherever we are we reproduce ourselves. People reflect themselves by their surroundings. We create an order around us, a mirror of what we are. I’m fascinated by what objects absorb of people.”

Rarely does Climent paint outright portraits of people but rather depicts them indirectly by way of settings they occupy and cherished possessions kept close at hand. Employing remarkable technique, often she does duplicate snapshots or little paintings of individuals, mostly family members, but these likenesses cohabit shelves, counters, table tops with a myriad of books, letters, clippings, and other personal items. Her tableaux, which often unite the sublime with the banal (a Leonardo reproduction, for example, next to a bottle of hair spray), also suggest that from the fringes of our awareness, as we focus on tasks at hand, objects constantly but mutely bombard us like bits of visual static. But in the other sense of the word, here the items she paints are not static, but best categorized as “unstill lifes.” The inclusion of elements like half-consumed beverages, lit candles or an open drawer reflect human activity underway. More to the point, many objects provoke an unsettling sense of loss and pain.

Climent would be the first to admit that her formative years were full of confusing, contradictory issues of identity through which she continues to work and about which she has written candidly (see In Search of the Present, the catalogue for her 1992 show at Mary-Anne Martin/Fine Art). But for my benefit, as background for our discussion of some new work for her upcoming show, she reiterates certain essential details from her past: “My father was a prominent artist, a refugee from Franco’s Spain. He was sharing a studio in Barcelona and one day a bomb fell on the building. All tangled up under a table, he survived but, fed up, at age 42, he walked out with the clothes on his back, first to France via the Pyrenees; eventually he arrived in Mexico City to start his life anew. He met my mother eight years later, while she was visiting Mexico as a tourist. She was a Jewish lady from Brooklyn, much younger than my father, from a working class background. Ultimately she abandoned her origins, married out of her faith against her father’s wishes. So my two sisters and I had parents who were both foreign to Mexico. No cousins, uncles. My father’s life was cut off due to the war. His father had been a fascist so there was that added division. Spain was like the other side of a mirror, a place not real, only accessible via my father’s imagination, his nostalgia crystallized. Longingly his paintings became a distilled essence of the Mediterranean world he so missed.”

“But for him to say his paintings were Spanish, that was impossible,” Climent continues. “Forget it! He used to mock every concept with any official identity. He said someday people wouldn’t need passports to identify their nationality. I felt his view of the world was that of an outsider, as if he were a Martian. He imagined Lincoln in a letter telling God he was having trouble in his country because part of the population had been exposed to the sun longer than the other and what could he do about it. He had all these visions. He used to call himself a mammal. He didn’t think we kids needed traditional schooling like reading and writing. Half jokingly he thought signing our name with an X would be all right. We were raised in a dreamland, a very appealing little house like an island floating in the Las Aguilas district of Mexico City. Even the shape of the door was interesting: very tiny, hidden, like entering a chamber, a submarine. When my father died 20 years ago, my mother froze time and the house became something else, an exile within an exile, another layer, defined by different reasons. She kept his studio like a shrine, with his brushes and papers all still in place, frozen in time.”

As a youngster Climent was close to her father and admired him but his powerful presence often was intimidating. “In 1969 my father was assaulted in Mexico City and almost killed. He longed to live in a place without fear. He realized he couldn’t wait for Franco to die because they were the same age. He was no longer blacklisted so he moved us back to Spain to live in a small town, Altea, south of his native Valencia. The isolation was not a good idea because my older sisters and I were teenagers and needed to attend high school. But the place provoked an awakening within me; that’s where I decided I wanted to be an artist. The area was very beautiful, colorful. I spent countless hours alone drawing. We stayed in Spain for two years, and I moved between Altea, Valencia, and Mallorca. I finished high school in Mexico but returned to Spain several times.”

“After high school I took a few classes in art school but my father didn’t believe in an institutional school system. He had attended such places in Valencia in 1910 when they were very strict, formal, and conservative. He thought schools would kill all the freshness in my work. He preferred to force me to find things out for myself. It was very scary [a favorite word for Climent] and for a time it made me very rigid; but in a way Spain helped clear up the enigma of my father because I came to know his family and where he had grown up.”

While her father was alive, Climent limited herself to drawing and watercolors because she didn’t want to venture into his domain of oil painting. “He was proud of what I did but ambivalent. He was very demanding, expecting of me the very best. He’d say, ‘If Rembrandt could do it, you too can reach the same high level of excellence!’ But in the same breath he would wonder whether as a woman I could be successful as an artist. He’d say, ‘Maybe you should go for more modest things.’ Whatever the case, I had to find my own language as an artist, go against what I called the ‘Climentometer,’ my father’s very strict, rigid esthetic values: this color doesn’t go with that, that line doesn’t look good. It was hard to fight because I really liked what he did but I wasn’t growing up in the same world he was. So out on the streets of Mexico City I began looking for things I liked, independent of what I was taught at home. My first series I called urban landscapes. I photographed doors, window, exterior things and worked from the snapshots back home. I was not sure this subject matter would be accepted but I followed my instincts and made this first show. People around me were shocked. They said my work belonged to the escuela de feismo [school of ugliness] but when the exhibit opened in 1988 at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, people were very responsive. They recognized their city; there was a connection.”

During the eighties, while she worked hard to discover her own artistic identity, Climent married Claudio Lomnitz, an anthropologist she had known since high school. “After the show at Bellas Artes, we moved to New York City,” Climent recalls. “I still had more to say about Mexico so I continued to paint balconies, birdcages, and windows. But then I realized I’m not just Mexican but also the daughter of someone from the United States, also Jewish and Catholic and lots of other things, so very timidly, nervously, I let these things infiltrate my work.” It was then that a body of increasingly mature work began to materialize: visual slices of life defined by humble objects through which she talked about herself and people close to her. Most of the oil paintings were small works on canvas stretched over wood, a firm surface upon which she could precisely apply her tiny brush strokes. Despite their modest dimensions, the paintings teemed with details dealing with profound issues within herself and common to the lives of other people. Climent also did watercolors, a spontaneous but demanding medium she turned to for relief from the more tedious application of oil paint. In addition to the aforementioned exhibit, In Search of the Present—as well as a companion show in Mexico in 1993 at the Galería de Arte Mexicano, En busca del presente—Climent did two more successful shows during the nineties with Martin in New York, Re-encounters (1995) and To My Parents (1997).

From 1998 to 1999, Elena, Claudio, and the children returned to Mexico for a sabbatical year, in which they lived in the house where Elena had grown up, the one portrayed in To My Parents. Up until then, Climent feels her output was decidedly split between the quotidian vignettes for which she had gained a reputation and a completely separate group of dreamlike landscapes she did for herself alone. The former looked inward, mostly backward in time hence nostalgically, whereas the latter reached outward beyond the confines of her physical world to embrace sometimes imagined future possibilities. “The year in Mexico, very tough and made worse because we constantly worried about our kids, was also enriching,” Climent says philosophically. “I’m not at all sorry we did it because in a way I discovered time. To be in the bedroom working where you slept as a baby—this really confronts you with the issue of time. One day I felt compelled to finally clean out all the drawers and cabinets in my father’s studio, which had been intact for decades. It was a big effort. I had to do it and it had to be that very day. Suddenly I realized that it was the anniversary of my father’s death. All these perceptions began to show in my work. I started making paintings with different time frames. My upcoming show will be full of that: an outside expanse, often through a window, in one period and place, perceived from an interior defined by a different moment and locale: everything fused together. It’s like when you are sitting here now doing one thing but thinking of somewhere else in the past or future: space, time, memory. Or maybe you’re sitting talking on the phone with someone far away. So my two lines of painting are finally coming together. It’s been one of my biggest problems—that division of time—but I think I have found a way to blend them, so that my dreams can penetrate the here and now.”

Hints of Climent’s desire to broaden her field of vision by removing her emotional blinders can be seen in some earlier work. For example, a painting which graces the catalog cover for her last show features a large mirror reflecting stairs leading upwards to an implied space (heaven?) which must be hovering above the table she has filled with memorabilia. “Yes, it’s true, often elements from one period point the way to the next,” Climent concedes. “But now it’s much more focused, purposeful.” In Green Kitchen with Baked Rice, Climent’s paean to domesticity contains shelves holding spices, soy sauce, pastel santitos and, with quiet humor, a little devil of red clay. The foreground centerpiece appears to be a casserole dish containing a Valencia style paella so painstaking realized one can taste it, but Climent’s sense of place and culture is much more precise. “It’s a platter of arroz al horno, typical of Valencia from where my father comes. I want to learn to cook that dish,” she explains, as she retrieves a book on Spanish cooking from which the image originates. She also shows me a newspaper clipping replicated on the canvas about a deceased writer, Gaby Brimer, who lived in Climent’s neighborhood and suffered from cerebral palsy. “It is very touching. Her nanny loved her so much. She was a happy person despite her paralysis.”

The tradition of interior settings with windows through which spacious exterior vistas are revealed is of course an old visual device particularly favored by early Netherlandish masters like Bouts, Memling, and van Eyck. They are Climent heroes whose superb technique she has long admired and carefully studied from books. Sometimes they painted monochromatically, a tradition called grisaille, and Climent, too, often employs just shades of gray to render not only snapshots, but more recently also exterior vistas that seem bleak, dead, lost in time. Perhaps they represent closed business. She also delights in challenging herself with the same sorts of complex optical illusions Flemish painters used to showcase their mastery: scenes revealed through mirrors, lenses, or crystal spheres. A small work in progress on a nearby shelf of Climent’s studio is typical in this sense [no. 8, Shelf with Mirror in Green Room]. The observer perceives blazing noontime light filtered through lush foliage of an imagined Tepoztlán garden which is then diffused through a window and bounced off a dresser-top mirror. In contrast, deep shadows define a cool interior with a foreground of family photos of Climent’s husband, children and father, also a penciled note, flower petals, necklace, and ribbon. Climent later shows me a transparency of a related, larger painting which is almost all tropical verdure through an imagined window [no. 11, Window in Tepoztlán with Photos of Aunt Amparo and Enrique]. It’s Tepoztlán again, with replicated photos on the sill which look back through time to when the artist helped her son, Enrique, learn to hit a piñata, and another photo, when her cousin Amparo, as a baby, teetered precariously on the lap of her mother. Climent subtly signals the garden is part of her hoped-for future by repeating the foliage in miniature, inverted, within a crystal ball.

As further evidence of her efforts to unify in one painting several places and moments, Climent picks up another nearly finished canvas, special for its tension between a landscape of vibrant blue-greens and an interior of luminous burnt orange and rust tones [no. 17, Room with Landscape of Burgundy]. Mentally she zooms in on the locale: “This is France, well Burgundy, no, actually, it’s a village near Vézelay of which I took photos when I visited but I’m imagining it from a Mexican bedroom.” The lower, interior half of the painting, consisting of a window seat covered by a kilim and Indian embroideries containing mirrors, is executed in the virtuosic spirit of the Old World masters who replicated oriental carpets to demonstrate what they could do with paint and brush. Once again the mood is peaceful: a glass of juice, an apple on a plate, a pencil and sketch pad, favorite books on Bosch and Japanese prints. But the tranquility has an edge to it, signaled by a cordless phone which at any moment might interrupt the peaceful scene. Anxiety is a constant for Climent although she is trying to put some of it to rest. “If you were to ask me to put it in simple words,” Climent volunteers, “this show is like ending my parents’ house and about building my new home. The main subject is my effort to create a harmony that contains all my realities from different times and places. Many things have happened lately that have allowed me to put things together. I’m working through them in my new paintings.”

Art as catharsis is not unusual but the degree to which Climent pours every drop of her being into each painting is rare, hence one wonders how she feels upon parting with her work. “Sometimes when I finish a painting, I don’t want to live with it anymore because it reminds me of the situation I was in. But occasionally I do save paintings.” She then takes me to the living room to show me a canvas done in memory of her mother, with dried flowers, books she treasured, a tin of her favorite orange drops, votive candles, a broken statue of San Roque, a snippet of her mother peeking out from one of the seven photos of family members. She has also kept two recent paintings, one for her husband which imagines a workroom for him full of his things and another watercolor which depicts a diminutive Climent hard at work in her studio with an expanse of Tepoztlán greenery outside the door. A positive mood also emanates from a large painting of a decade ago in the dining room which causes Climent to chuckle as she recalls asking permission from a mechanic to let her paint the turquoise wall of his repair garage. “He gave me three days and then threw me out because he needed the space. I finished it in the studio from photos but he had all this wonderful stuff on his wall: religious prints, framed dollar bills, a clock, first aid box, calendar, artificial flowers. In Mexico people may be poverty stricken financially but many still find resourceful ways to imbue their visual world with richness and abundance.”

Currently a selection of her work from the last ten years has been traveling as a show called Antología. Organized in 1998 by Arquiteco Jorge Bribiesca who now directs the Museo Pape in Monclova, Coahuila, the exhibition also has appeared in the Mexican cities of Saltillo and Oaxaca as well as Paris, Vienna, and Madrid under the auspices of Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Plans are afoot for it to travel to Washington, D. C., Chicago, and possibly New York City. As a separate project, a monograph on her work, with text by Ricardo Pozas, also is in the works.

In that Climent takes the measure of others through their possessions it seems only fair to turn the table on her momentarily to describe a few more things in her home that reveal her values and concerns. For example, Climent delights in hanging examples of her own children’s art right alongside her efforts. Some represent collaborative projects, notably a replica of a Mexican almacén (grocery store) full of hundreds of miniscule shelf goods and produce items which she and her kids modeled from a paste called “Sculpey” and painted with infinite patience. Most revealing are her own books, few of which deal with other artists but rather serve as sources for the stuff of her paintings: tiles, antique toys, commercial packaging, product labels, artisan goods. She has many of the Artes de Mexico softbound publications which provide added visual ammunition including images related to the Day of the Dead, the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and various popular traditions. One of her favorite books is a fat catalog from a 1994-5 exhibit at Mexico’s Museo Nacional de Arte devoted to games which in ages past tested one’s ingenuity. The book also contains moralistic imagery (for example Lorenzo Zendejas’s 19th century serie del pecador arrepentido) as well as paintings by unknown artists of a popular vein.

As our visit neared its close, by way of a stack of transparencies Climent briefly guided me through the body of work she is patiently assembling for her upcoming show. In each case I am struck by her passionate devotion to the act of painting and the acute power of observation she brings to bear to discover what things say about the people around them. In that sense, detailed objects in paintings by Petrus Christus or Robert Campin or the verdure of a Giovanni di Paolo panel come to mind because they, too, embody the delight that comes from looking closely. Climent’s work is firmly rooted in that Old World tradition that began with the flamencos who so strongly influenced Spanish painters who in turn became vehicles for transmission of a kind of visual integrity that found new expression in devotional and genre paintings in the New World during the colonial period and long after. Refreshingly so, Climent’s work is an extension of that sequence applied to her own times. Given her origins, her paintings are evocative of her birthplace but mercifully free of clichés, patronizing gestures, or anything that could be called parochial or regional. Quite to the contrary, and especially due to her new mission to embrace all places with which she has had contact, her work reflects a global sense of herself and her homeland as part of a larger, but paradoxically, shrinking world. Just a review of titles for recent works is revealing in the way they oscillate between seemingly disparate locations—Burgundy, Pátzcuaro, Chicago, Coahuila, SoHo in New York City, Vermont, her beloved Tepoztlán—places that also have become part of our collective awareness because humankind is a restless breed these days. Clearly Climent’s sense of place and time is not sequential or linear, nor even fashionably circular, but rather irrational and erratic, in response to the random stimuli that energize everyone’s thoughts.

As previously stated, when I arrived at Climent’s apartment I felt I was inside one of her paintings, especially one of the earlier ones, full of personal objects. Upon taking my leave, I found myself perceiving my surroundings in a new way, her way, via a bifurcated awareness of two realities, one inside, one outside, at different moments in time. Part of me seemed to linger within the security of her fourth floor flat with its warm colors and balmy climate, but the other part was down on the street, shivering, waiting for an airport shuttle as wind whipped snow off Lake Michigan. Climent paints about the substance of our days.