Elena Climent's delicate, evocative still lifes - pictures of accumulated objects she painstakingly collects, arranges and reproduces - may be seen as performances, that is, as representations of the act of ordering. Climent is exceptionally deliberate about precisely what objects appear in her work, despite the seemingly vast array of things that populate her canvases. Her willful selection is the subject of her art: vases, candles, books, dolls, plants, birds, fruit, keys, photographs, letters, and the detritus of everyday life at the end of the twentieth century, all hold meaning for the artist.

10. Red Devil with Broken Angel, 1994

For Climent, her paintings "symbolize feelings through objects" and she thinks of them as stories, and although the viewer is not necessarily cognizant of the specific narrative she has in mind, the intense realism of her formal style and the sheer accumulation of "facts" are riveting. We scrutinize these dazzling, detailed, and tightly painted still lifes for clues, messages, meanings. The evocation of the mystical in works such as Red Devil with Broken Angel and Catalogue of Bosch, as well as their small size, reveals their lineage from the MexiIcan ex-voto. A paraphrase of Diego Rivera's observation regarding the subject matter of the retablo is eminently applicable to Climent's work: miraculous events are made ordinary and everyday things are turned into miracles.

Climent is motivated by the acute knowledge that things from her past have been lost to her, and that through the act of reproducing her inheritance she can claim it for herself. Never far from her mind is the idea of heritage, of coming to terms with who she is. This decidedly Mexican pre-occupation is evident especially in the vanguard movements in the early part of this century. In rejecting European influences, the artists of the Mexican mural movement and the Estridentistas (Mexico's answer to the Futurists) self-consciously sought to advance a specifically Mexican art, and in so doing, they honored the multi-racial ancestry that is the heritage of virtually all Mexicans.

Climent's search is not quite as literal as that of her Mexican progenitors. Rather, her paintings now emanate the poignancy of the expatriate, in part because she is no longer living in Mexico where she was born and raised, the daughter of two exiles (her mother was an American Jew and her father a Spanish liberal). After six years of living in New York City, there are noticeable if subtle changes in Climent's work. Mexican middle-class household scenes of a family's altar with a tattered reproduction of the Virgin of Guadalupe or a kitchen shelf stacked with packaged foods were predominant in her work before leaving Mexico. Unequivocally antifolkloric, her pictures were, nevertheless, reminders of her childhood and were steeped in a nostalgia for a past at odds with the standards of "good taste" which was part of her upbringing and which she was expected to uphold. Once abroad, Climent continued this theme, painting from photographs she had taken during visits home. Often she copied a casual snapshot completely or took it as a setting to structure items she imported from Mexico such as votive candles and brightly colored plastic tablecloths.

• Ordering Objects: Acts of Time
  Sarah M. Lowe
• Checklist
• Artist's Bio