Brian Fallon | Introduction to Decade (A retrospective catalogue published in 2006)
TOM CLIMENT is a highly individual artist, still relatively youthful, who is rather out of step with current fashion and is all the better for that. Instead of playing cerebral games with his material, he paints for the love and also – I should say – for the fun of it. I have tracked his progress, intermittently, since I awarded him the Victor Treacy Prize some years ago, against talented competition.
Since then his style has changed to a certain extent, outwardly if not in essentials. Broadly speaking, it stresses “painterly” values and broad, sometimes laden brushstrokes, and originally it had a certain, what I can only call neo-Baroque tendency. The tonality was often rather dark and sultry with slashes of brighter colour, suggesting a modernised version of chiaroscuro; the subject was not precisely figurative but suggested figurative themes. I had the impression, right or wrong, that he had been looking hard at Spanish painting, and perhaps at Baroque painting in general.
His latest works maintain the painterly breadth and freedom, but the previous rather dark – and slightly sinister – subject matter has largely vanished and has been replaced by a type of self-sufficient and slightly enigmatic imagery. It is strongly suggestive in itself, as before, but gives no guidelines as to any specific “meaning.” These pictures, to state the obvious, are not “about” anything but are more or less self-generating organisms. They speak the language of paint and not the language of hackneyed association.
It has not been an easy period for young painters, though the times are changing – much more basically and much more Quickly, in fact, than established opinion or established values would admit. Even as recently as six years ago, we were still being fed the familiar cant that painting as such had mostly become Old Hat and that conceptualism (much of it allegedly based on the example of Marcel Duchamp), installation ism and a multitude of other -isms had taken its place. Even photography, which had been doing all right on its own, was supposed somehow to be part of this New Wave. The art colleges opportunistically went along with the trend -indeed many of them actively propagated it, largely for their own ends.
They, and a lot of others, now look like being left with mud on their faces. Painting is back – almost uncritically so in fact, as you can see from the auction prices paid for what is often no more than a rehash of hackneyed traditional styles. But of course, in reality, it never really went out – those born to paint just painted on, no matter what fashion said. Tom Climent is one of a generation which stuck to its guns and is coming into its own.
Brian Fallon was art critic at The Irish Times until his retirement in 1998.
He was a founder board member of IMMA, (1989 – 1995), and writes regularly about Irish Art.