Mark Ewart | Review of New Paintings | Fenton Gallery | The Irish Times | 2003Over a relatively short period of time, Tom Climent has achieved a considerable amount as a painter, picking up a number of high-profile plaudits along the way.
What is most striking about Climent’s paintings is the way in which they declare a dramatic physicality while conversely appearing to be quite subtle in their ambition. The ‘action within appears transitional, a moment frozen, where the players have vacated the stage, and we are left in their absence to inhabit a strange, discordant place. Within these spaces Climent allows rich and varied paint surfaces to do battle.
In the large painting Obscura, the subject appears to be a coastline setting rendered in twilight colours. In places, the paint is softly layered, allowing the canvas to glow underneath, but a menacing black rectangular shape, which covers approximately three-quarters of the painting, challenges this. In Venetian Concert, the paint is applied more thickly and has a molten property which conveys a lava-like surface – an appropriate metaphor for the energy’ within this exhibition.