Isabel Healy | Review of Dancing Parade | Triskel Arts Centre | The Irish Examiner | 1998
Tom Climent’s new exhibition is a move to more subtle work by the popular artist
MORE than almost any other artist emerging from Cork, Tom Climent has a loyal following. Even before he graduated from the Crawford College of Art in 1995, Tom was already exhibiting, and his large, vibrant canvases, influenced by Velasquez and Goya, were selling well.
In 1996 he won the Victor Treacy Award from the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny and in 1997 the Tony O’Malley Award and a residency in Lithuania. To date, Tom has had work in nine group shows and held one exhibition in Dublin and two in the Blackcombe in Cork, but his latest, Dancing Parade, is his first in the Triskel Arts Centre.
Familiar with his work and anticipating more of the same, the fans flocked to the opening last week only to find Tom had moved from the hot rumbustiousness of Spain to the cool stylishness of France: a new, flatter canvas, a lighter brush stroke, a quieter voice and a more mellow palette.
Born in Cork into a musical family (half Irish, half Spanish) Tom Climent studied electrical engineering after school and his parents were alarmed when he chucked in his printed circuit boards for paints and brushed the year he was due to qualify at the CIT.
Tom wanted to be an artist and he started his new path at the Crawford in 1991. Through his studies he was drawn to the painters of his father’s country and began producing interiors thickly worked in dark colours stabbed with bright reds and yellows, depicting life and lusty living in a style between abstract and figurative.
Now 28, Tom has a good business head and is confident in his work; yet shy, never pushy, he sees himself as developing and moving on from what was a lucrative and energetic style and approach.
“I follow my instincts and painting has to be exciting. I don’t want to be a prisoner of my work, I can only paint what I feel like painting and maybe I just got bored”, he says. “People say it takes 10 years to find a voice, I am only out of college a few years and am really only starting off, trying different stuff and different strands are coming together.
The Triskel show, which runs until August 24, is an exercise in composition and structure influenced by Degas’ dancers. The paintings of abstract figures in interior aces are, in the main, smaller than Climent’s previous works, but he compensates for this by producing two series of four and nine paintings, saying that the scale is still the same but the details are just in several pieces rather than one big one.
“The earlier work is chaotic, everything was all together”, says Tom, who wanted to take out and examine different aspects in sequence.
He consciously wanted to produce a series and picked green – almost randomly – as a background colour from which to work, deliberately making the texture flatter so that the paint itself would not constitute a distraction from the images on the canvases, leaving only a miasma of their movement. Sometimes unsure how the finished series would fit together, he was delighted to find that the Triskel provided the perfect space for the result the was trying to achieve.
There are 15 paintings but, in effect, only four when taken in series. The individual paintings cost £2,600 (four have already sold) and the series cost£2,000 each but the artist does not want to break up the groups despite the fact that it could hinder impulse sales based on love at first sight.
Though he always likes figures in context, the dancers are not altogether important, the overall movement and composition is what matters.
The work is subtle, quiet and reserved compared to his lusty and noisy Spanish-influenced work.
The artist does not differentiate, however, between Spanish and French. He notes different strands, rather than taking ideas from the masters.“I’m just content to be in the whole tradition of painting. I like loads of different paintings but what I learn from them is not always obvious. It is normal to be influenced, to take stuff on board.”
Then he adds, somewhat uncomfortably: “I’m not mad about talking that much. I’d prefer people to come in and see for themselves”.
He is actually echoing Edgar Degas: “The artist does not draw what he sees, but what he must make others see”.
Triskel Arts Centre, Tobin Street, Cork City, Ireland www.triskelartscentre.ie