Alannah Hopkins | Review of Dancing Parade | Triskel Arts Centre | The Sunday Times | 1998
To say that Dancing Parade consists of a series of paintings inspired by Degas gives little idea of what an exciting achievement it is. Al the works are, broadly speaking, variations on that familiar image of the ballerina at the barre.
Climent’s ballet dancer is more abstract than the Degas figure and is often suggested by an almost transparent play of planes and light as in The Swan Dancer, left. The studio is painted in shades of green and yellow, and a panel of light on the left appears to be a mirror reflecting light from a window.
Dancing Parade, a series of four medium-sized canvasses in oil and acrylic, concentrates on the movement of the dancers, progressing towards an ever more simplified mode in which the figures become less clearly represented, more implied. The triumph of the show is a series of nine paintings that start and end apparently as abstracts. The “abstract” is revealed to be grounded in a detail of the now-familiar studio, which materialises before our eyes, and is then taken away again. The series is a brilliant illustration of how an artist creates illusion and moves between apparent abstraction and representation.
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