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Elena Climent The paintings of Elena Climent transport the viewer into the space of suspended time. Every work is a vignette composed in a mystical half-light. Her subjects occupy the ambiguous space between experience and memory, like a dream interrupted at the moment of awakening. Climent adeptly manipulates the familiar, the mundane and the profane into compositions that rise beyond the realm of ritual to that of the sacred. Her paintings touch the depth of our senses with a personal discourse based in the present yet shadowed in the emotion of an ever-present and defining past. Climent’s paintings may at first appear to explore architectural arrangements, niches, shelves, altars, and objects of adoration. But, this is no simple study of iconography based in the communion of saints. Her paintings are orchestrated transfigurations of familiar arrangements and locales that reveal and illuminate popular culture. But it is Climent’s genius to take these references and gently touch on the often ignored or buried past residing within each of us. Climent is remarkable in her ability to reveal a world of multiple dimensions, brilliantly juxtaposing degrees of tenderness, strength, and irony. She creates and resolves tension through a harmonic balance; we are mesmerized and hypnotically pulled into a world where the emotion of a personal history not only resides but flourishes. In her work, we are able to transcend time and enter a space that is beyond our touch, a realm bordering on the surreal, free of the shadows that mark the passing of time, yet illuminated by the flames of eternity. Climent does not pretend to be cool or objective in a subjective world. She places before us a rare combination of images that awakens our emotions, reminding us to recognize and pay homage to the past, to which we will eventually belong. She has taken the time to observe and to paint the emotion of memory, which most of us have discarded in the course of life’s journey. With the artist as our guide, we are able recapture some of those moments, entering into a world of her construction. Our dialogue with these works affords an opportunity to look through the window of her imagination, to a space that offers safe harbor from the chaos and insecurity of our contemporary world. Climent’s dialogue is an ongoing debate between tradition and modernity, reflecting a baroque quality in a post-modern age. Through her effective use of counterpoint we find serenity and harmony; this combination of the sophisticated and the naïve, the sacred and the profane, the past and the present, results in the gentle balance of perfection, the visual equivalent of a late medieval chant.
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