Robert O’Byrne | Dictionary of Living Irish Artists | 2009
Few young artists of late have caused such excitement at their debut as Tom Climent. But then again, few young Irish artists begin their painting career by offering his kind of stirring exuberance. Within a year of graduating from Cork’s Crawford College of Art and Design, Climent had won the Victor Treacey Award for emerging artist and begun to garner widespread critical accolades. At the time of his first solo exhibition in Dublin in August 1997, the Sunday Business Post’s Marion McKeone declared, ‘ It’s difficult not to eulogise Climent’s work; lush and rich, it moves miles from the stark abstractism favoured by so many painters. His work is mature and self-assured…the glorious, rich colours splashed across giant canvasses create baroque, extravagant works’
Baroque was a term frequently evoked when describing Climent’s pictures in the late 1990s and it was applicable not just because their theatrical manner so often evoked memories of the 17th century Spanish masters to whom the artist acknowledged a debt but also owing to their grandiose scale. Looking back on this work in 2005, former Irish Times critic Brian Fallon recalled how ‘ the tonality was often dark and sultry with splashes of brighter colour, suggesting a modernised version of chiaroscuro; the subject was not precisely figurative but suggested figurative themes.’ Early in the new millennium Climent’s work underwent a change, not least in scale since he began painting much smaller works on board rather than canvas as before. Furthermore while retaining their heightened lyricism his images became more abstact even as his palette grew brighter, the latter perhaps a response to periods of time spent in Spain where, like George Campbell several decades before him, he was struck by the difference between Irish and Iberian light. In 2006 Vera Ryan observed that Climent was now more influenced by Howard Hodgkin – the subject of his college history thesis – than by old masters. And while he has only on occasion reverted to painting on a large scale, his saturated colouring always retains its brilliance.
‘He is an innately good painter and a fantastic colourist,’ declared Cork gallerist Nuala Fenton in 2005. ‘His work is developing all the time, which makes him all the more interesting to follow…There is a real sense of energy and drama about his work, but there is also something very emotional about it and it’s very subtle.’ Fenton was right to note how Climent’s work is still developing as he continues to discover his own potential. Recent paintings tend to possess an architectonic quality with structures that seem to serve a religious function shown looming out of a mysterious fog. No longer a young artist, he continues to dazzle with his painterly pyrotechnics.