Elena Climent
In Search of the Present
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Elena Climent: Recent Paintings
Edward J. Sullivan
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Kitchen Cupboard, 1991
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Elena
Climent's art developed in a climate of insecurity, in an age of conundra.
Mexican artists of the 1970's were attempting to come to grips with the
changes that the late 60's had brought to society. Their artistic expressions,
maturing in the 1980's, sought originality without conformity to imported
values or prototypes. While they did not want to revive the past they could
not wholly reject it as had the generation of painters and sculptors before
them. Yet the models of an earlier time seemed insufficient to express the
anxiety of the present. Things were no longer pretty. Space was no longer
limitless-public squares appeared smaller and smaller and the places people
lived and gathered together seemed to he ever more reduced in scale. Past
reflections of daily life in Mexico could not possibly be recreated-the times
and places represented in the art of the painters of the 30's and 40's had
become the substance of myth and legend. Contemporary life left little room
for legend-even if their vocabulary were based on the language of the
telenovella. What Elena Climent has been able to do so well is to create
alternatives for herself. Just as she is a basically selftaught artist she has
fashioned her own private strategies for dealing with the past and present.
Her visual language is unique. It does not contain the ironies, sarcasm or
despair of many painters of her generation. She accepts the reality she finds,
internalizes it and makes it into a realm of her own. For the past several
years Climent has lived in New York. The distance between her physical
surroundings and the places in Mexico that she paints has added an even
deeper dimension of thoughtfulness and sobriety to her work. Places and
moments are crystallized into frozen drops of time. They are looked at and
analyzed by the artist in order to extract from them their essential
qualities. Far away from Mexico City
Climent is able to objectify the artifacts of middle-class life which she
recreates. This distance helps to divorce any hints of sentimentality from
her pictorial scrutiny. Her subjects are never depicted as fetishes of modern
life but simply as its signifiers.
Elena Climent's paintings are also, in a
curious way, about power. When speaking of "power" I do not mean the power
of domination and control but the power of self assurance and personal
strength. There is a particular potency to these representations of what is
specifically, in many cases, a woman's domestic reality. The kitchen,
dressing room or child's bedroom are some of the principal settings for her
paintings. Her art depicts the locus of female presence. While there is often
a nonchalance to the places and things in her work there is, at the same
time, a sobering gravity to the inner life of these objects and what they tell
us about the persons with whom they are associated. In Elena Climent's work
there is a rare honesty and openness infrequently encountered in art today.
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