Cristín Leach’s catalogue introduction to the exhibition Everlast at Solomon Fine Art | July 2020
“When I’m working, I try to stay out of it.” Tom Climent, when he is working, is not thinking about particular places. The places he paints are nowhere and everywhere. One remarkable aspect of his work is that every painting feels like some place we might know.
There has been a shift in these new paintings. There is more abundance and growth in them. They contain a faster set of shapes. The multi-faceted landscapes and built-looking structures of recent years, which shimmer and refract, sitting in locations that feel familiar and pregnant with rooted emotions, have yielded in some of this new work to forms that lift upwards, like mushrooms and bunches of flowers, even humanoid shapes. Chin up, eyes up, they are growing towards the sky more than they are rooting to the ground. Is this an antidote to the darkness, I ask him? Perhaps it’s a medicine for it, we agree.
My visit to his Cork studio is the last “social” encounter I have before Ireland begins its Coronavirus lockdown. The start of 2020 is a strange time, here and everywhere. As we speak, a global anxiety is looming, something big and bad is coming for us all. And yet, here are Climent’s paintings, which despite their rainbow colours, are deeply rooted in an understanding of the dark.
He’s been thinking about tree stumps, and the new things that grow from them: “that life force that’s always there.” It’s a sobering thought, and a hopeful one. We talk about ancient, spiritual places: the undersides and peaks of mountains, the shadows beneath rocks, the land itself. “There’s a lot of surface to the work now,” he notes, “texture, sand and plaster.” Elements of rock mixed with the paint reiterate the fact that although these paintings reach towards the sky, they are anchored in elements that come from the earth.
Gold has been a feature of his work for the past decade. Is it symbolic? “For me, it’s a kind of doorway into something else… It’s a kind of light power source,” he says. You can feel that intention in the surfaces of the paintings. Is it related to the sun? “It’s hopeful,” he says, “that’s one of the things that’s in it.” Climent is a kind of alchemist, a wizard conjuring joyous prisms from the ground.
The mountain paintings tend to culminate in a peak. “It’s like this sharp point pointing upwards, and it comes up from the ground, a focal point,” he says. These peaks are like the tip of an ancient arrowhead, a flint-carved point that can fly, and is therefore of rock and sky. Mushroom shapes are part of the unexpected shift in velocity that is a feature of these new works. Mushrooms spring up overnight, unlike mountains. Everlast is the name of the show. It implies enduring. Not just like a rocky landscape, but in an act of endlessly active rejuvenation.
Some of these works are like portraits, which feels new. Bloom recalls a figure wearing a cap. Germinate, the most floral painting here, recalls a head with hair, or a headdress, growth. There are leaf shapes, like petals, in this work: burgeoning shapes, faster shapes, overflowing fronds, cascading, tumbling. Something is mobile again, not like the slow, solid mountains that have come to anchor his work. Still, there is Crown, Aurelia, Conductor, with their peaks and outcrops of prisms.
“I used to paint in a looser way and now my work is more structured,” says Climent. This is true, and there is a reassuring solidity to the flatness of his planes. There is also the idea of an iceberg inherent in all of this. Shores of Light implies that what’s underneath is as important as what is seen. New forms grow from invisible roots. The feeling that humans are here and also absent is common in his paintings. Landbridge gives the impression of field markings, visible interventions made to divide the land. Climent paints the geometric shapes of nature and sometimes adds the shapes humans make to compliment or layer over them. Paintings like Gateway, Guide or Sundew, offer more organic takes without the rainbow prisms. Towards the Sun lies somewhere between the two. And then there are surprises: Elixir and Nectar are small paintings of rainbow containers, ancient palisades, high-rises, popcorn boxes.
Climent’s work has changed, slowly, intuitively, over time. It has also always been mysteriously in tune with the times, sometimes a little ahead of events, as it is again now. These paintings, produced as the world hurtled towards a global pandemic, knew nothing of what was to come, but saw signs of it everywhere. Meristem looks like a stump, and it presents the possibility of a whole new world growing from something that might appear to be beyond rejuvenation, a life force that everlasts.