Alannah Hopkin | A Place of Refuge, a Beacon of Light, 2010

Tom Climent's work has been steadily evolving over the years, its constants being his devotion to the process of painting, and his use of deeply saturated colour and intricately worked surfaces. His new show features architectural forms, which hover between background and foreground, emerging from turbulent areas of atmospheric colour and texture that suggest heightened natural phenomena (sunrise, sunset, mist and storm), or some unreal landscape of the imagination. The buildings are fixed points, beacons of light, while all around the tempest rages.

The artist is drawn to church and tower shapes, not for religious reasons, but as illustrations of the notion of a sanctuary or place of refuge, a category that also seems to include the cottage. The buildings, whether single shapes or in clusters, contain a calm focal point within the layers of colour and haze, whether it is the light reflected from a steeple, from the gable ends of a cottage, or the beam of a lighthouse. The precision and idiosyncrasy of the buildings' design, their clear outline and realistic perspective, the way that shadows fall from one part of the building on to another, contrast with the more intuitive painting of the dramatically layered, non-figurative context in which the building is placed. The Italianate basilica in Pavillion seems to hover in a blur of colour, as if seen from a fast-moving train. Others, like the lighthouses in Oculus and Pico and the cottage in House of Departure are concealed behind a veil of mist or, as in Mihrab, viewed hauntingly through a patina of age. The hypnotic quality of the artist's fusion of real and abstract recalls T.S. Eliot's lines: human kind/Cannot bear very much reality.

Conventional distinctions between background and foreground are confounded, as the architectural shapes loom up and recede before our eyes. The walls and roofs of buildings become planes, deeply textured blocks of colour. A fruitful tension is created between the closely observed buildings, and the strangeness of the colours around them, a new variation on the play between abstract and representational that has always characterised Climent's work. The buildings prompt memories of real places, the colours evoke alternately Ireland and the Mediterranean, recalling the artist's part-Spanish background. As always, the artist leaves it to the viewers to bring their own interpretation to the painting, to go in and explore the painting, or simply to enjoy the rich juxtaposition of colour, form and texture. Either way, the experience is immensely stimulating and satisfying.

Alannah Hopkin