Windows from Here to Then

Elena Climent

In a letter written in February, 1999, the artist wrote of the paintings she was preparing for this exhibition:

“I am working on a series of landscapes, which, though realistic, are not straightforward representations. They are a combination of times and spaces that depict my day-to-day perceptions of reality.

At present I am living in Mexico City, in the house where I was born and raised and which has changed very little since I left it twenty years ago.

Inside this house I can easily imagine myself going back and forth in time, especially in the studio that belonged to my father which has now been passed on to me, unaltered, eighteen years after his death.

All around me are reminders of the past and my imagination is enriched by inherited memories that merge into my own experiences, past and present. We are no longer in one place only. What is far away can also be near. I communicate on a routine basis with my close friends in Europe, South America, the U.S. and Mexico through email and telephone.

I can be having a long conversation with somebody who is thousands of miles away, say “bless you” when she or he sneezes, joke about offering a sip of my coffee (which makes us aware of our physical distance). I can be worried about a bill I need to pay in Chicago (my other home) and not be sure if I left my book on Impressionism in my house there or here.

I am constantly confronted with the question of ownership: do I own what I can’t have? If half of my possessions are in one country and the other half in another, do I own all of them at once?

How close am I to someone I haven’t seen for years but with whom I converse every week? I am not sure how this person looks anymore! And how different is this distance barrier from the limits set by time? How do I deal with the feeling of displacement that I get from being in a space that has hardly changed when everything around it is unrecognizable?

I think about what my life was like before, what it meant to be in two countries thirty years ago. For example, Spain (the country my father came from after the Spanish Civil War and where we spent some years during my youth) was so far away! It was a long time away! It took a lot of money-saving to get there and once you were able to go it had to be a long stay to make it worthwhile.

Communication back and forth was also much more difficult and infrequent. To make a telephone call between Spain and Mexico you had to reserve your connection with a couple of days notice. The whole thing was a big event and it made you feel important. The conversation was usually short, clumsy and nervous, with the family standing around the phone both hopeful and scared of getting a chance to say a quick hello and goodbye. It was a big deal; it was very exciting.

Today I pick up the telephone and call, on a moment’s notice, a friend or relative in this or that country to continue a conversation we had to interrupt a few days ago.

Information comes and goes at different speeds and our mind tries to adjust to the overlap of confusing realities which sometimes seem senseless and irreconcilable.

I look at my video collection and decide whether I want to spend the next two hours in the Middle Ages, the Victorian period or the future. Later I open a book and look at paintings by Rembrandt. I change my mind and choose a book of photographs of Brazil. I then think about all of this and try to find what it all has in common. I want to know who I am in the middle of it. I pick up the phone and call a friend in a nearby town to share my thoughts with her.

Where she is it is raining, where I am it is sunny. Our conversation about the Middle Ages, the Victorian period, the future, Rembrandt and Brazil, plus whatever she’s been doing herself, combines with the issue of the rain and the sunshine.

Yet, and this is what fascinates me, our talk makes perfect sense and we have a great conversation.

When I paint my landscapes I allow myself to include all I am made of. My life in Spain, France, the U.S., Mexico; my books on tape, the countless movies I’ve watched, good and bad, things far away, things near, things distant yet within reach, things close by but inaccessible.

I combine what is happening to me today with what I’m not even sure is truth about an old family anecdote. A photograph from a trip my parents made before I was born, and of which I know very little, with a table top where I have my month’s phone bill, still unpaid.

Through art I hope to find a truth that will enable me to live in this new global world without having to give up my identity. Through art I seek to create a “space” where all my “places and times” can coexist.

I want to find a consistency that will be as empowering and satisfying as it was when I could have my life linked to one home and one country, and where the people close to me were all dealing with a similar set of rules as myself.

We must adapt constantly to new situations and find ways to change without forgetting who we are. I am lucky to have art to help and allow me to make sense of all these transformations in my life.

Perhaps after all, through painting, I will find that a lot more remains intact than I have been led to believe.”