Alannah Hopkins | Irish Examiner 2000

Tom shows his strength by hitting the canvas

Tom Climent was the featured artist of Cork Institute of Technology’s Arts Fest 200. His new work wax at Gallery 44, MacCurtain Street, Cork, and consisted of five large works in oil and acrylic, two series of abstracts and a pair of water-colours.

Since graduating from the Crawford College of Art in 1994, Tom has been painting full-time and his works, generally on a very large scale, are much sought after by collectors.

The new series marks a change of direction, towards a more expressive less figurative style.

Tom describes the work as a return to the works inspired by Caravaggio and Rembrandt that hang in the Farmgate Restaurant in Cork’s indoor market.

Worship, the largest of the big works at 8’ x 6’, is a bravura performance, using paint directly from the tube in impasto to suggest the outline of a red kneeling figure and a blue lectern. The whole canvas is primed in acrylic in earthy tones which are then painted over in oil to create a background of considerable depth.

The sense of space and depth of background is an outstanding feature of Beloved.

The shape of a bed in an interior room is contained within an series of angles and shadows.

A block of bright red in the foreground leaps out at the viewer, while a dark window in the background leads the viewer in to the picture.

Bedrock features another bed shape, but the title indicates its ambiguity: is it a bed or a rock?

Tom does not work from preliminary sketches, but prefers to paint directly on to the canvas, letting the paint and the way it flows dictate the eventual form of the painting.

This process is evident in Buddha, a study in luscious reds, yellows and orange, with its contrasts of round and sharp edges and its highly worked surfaces.

The smaller, more abstract works in two series are based on small sections or corners of the larger paintings - variations on the same theme. But they lack the flow and spontaneity of the larger works.

In contrast, Tom’s venture into water-colour, a new departure, is a very welcome change of direction. The two Golden Butterfly paintings have a lightness of touch that echoes the spontaneity and the delight in colour of the larger works on a smaller more intimate scale.