Cristín Leach Hughes | Review of Final State | Blueleaf Gallery | The Sunday Times | 2012
One of the great joys of looking at painting lies in observing how the artist handles colour. The abstract architectural structures in Tom Climent’s compositions shimmer in a place where green and pink meet orange, and russet red dances with purple-violet blue. Climent incorporates plaster into the larger canvases. In Mountain Machine, it forms a floating ceiling with the texture of cracked lava above a cool interior. Walls appear to shift and slide with dreamlike inevitability; their soft, blurred edges imply a slow, tentative settling that is far from decisive and yet unavoidable. Climent paints slanted roofs and gable ends that echo the ghosts of built structures, unfinished and disused. At the base of Monument to the Hereafter, plaster lumps mimic the rubble of disturbed earth. These non-places are a kind of everyplace, but carry special resonance in the context of post-building boom Ireland. In Artificer Transducer, the house form morphs into something less specific: an almost crystalline structure, no longer manmade Climent’s use of colour borders on the psychedelic. It’s risky but assured and instinctively right. He makes pigment glow.