The Art of Elena Climent

Carlos Arias Vicuña

The work of Elena Climent confirms the concept that our culture consists of the everyday experience of our present together with our memories. Across the panorama of more than ten years of work, we may observe the level of refinement achieved by this singular artist of contemporary Mexican realism.
Some critics have placed her work within the realm of Neo-Mexicanismo, a visual arts movement that developed in the 80s, typified by such artists as Julio Galán, Germán Venegas and Rocío Maldonando. As I see it, her work employs a vocabulary that evokes Pop Art in its broadest definition, insofar as it references icons belonging to popular culture. In Latin America the influence of Pop is very diversified, having arrived mainly through the mass-media outlets of television and magazines. Today it forms part of our culture. There are also vernacular genres such as Magical Realism in literature and in the Mexican films of the 60s, in which images of kitsch and mundane plots seem more like moving photographs than cinema.
Climent’s work evokes a world charged with the baroque. The paintings are rendered in a realistic genre, but the disconnected images are ordered in a way that reminds us that this is a land where Surrealism is firmly rooted.

The religious icons that she depicts are frequently juxtaposed with pagan symbols and as well as familiar and intimate photographic images of time and memory. The paintings are executed with delicacy, patience and hours of labor. This process is best described by the artist in her own words. “The first thing I do on the canvas is to outline the composition, and place the elements in the appropriate place. When I paint, I try to recreate the same steps that are required in order to produce the objects that I depict. For example, if I am going to paint things in a transparent bag, I first paint the objects and then the bag. Or I paint the frame of the window and then the glass. For me this is essential. I try to investigate the manner in which objects were made in order to paint them accurately. I care very much for how objects look and how they affect one another: the reflections and the distortions, the way in which they are placed, how the back unites with the front and the visual effects that all this produces.”

A self-taught artist, Climent’s sensibility can be compared to a number of contemporary artists whose subject matter is popular culture. Her iconography also relates to that of artists who in the last decade have geared their efforts towards a more conceptual language, most particularly Francis Alys, in the poetic sentiment of his viewpoint and his visual preoccupations. For Climent, the poetic element, created by the engagement of the painted, photographed or printed image, meticulous in its realism, remains in dialogue with the artist’s critical vision of the political and the anthropological nature of contemporary Mexico.

Universidad de las Américas, Puebla
Cholula, 2003