Stepping into an artist’s studio is a privilege- one that as an arts worker, I never take for granted. As I approach Tom Climent’s studio, in the heart of Cork city, I smell paint, layers and layers of paint – I love that smell. My introduction to this new body of work Land and Longing begins before I literally enter. Tom’s place of work, his studio is productive and ordered, a place of physical work, of review, of self-challenge and consideration.

Art doesn’t happen by chance. Artists generate ideas but they need space and time to develop and work on these ideas – the studio is as such an environment more than a place. Looking around Climent’s studio you witness a specific environment and a demonstrable relationship between an artist and their art, the studio itself and its surroundings.

It is a place where countless hours have been spent physically making the works, making and undoing, remaking, reworking and ultimately accepting the works completion and that the work has journeyed and arrived at some point – at what he calls ‘an end point where you feel happy with the work’.

Climent is acutely self-aware and knows that it is through his work that he negotiates the world; his obsessions and concerns are in the works. The work absorbs different aspects of his life, but he says he is often surprised by what happens through the physical act of making them.

He likens crafting an exhibition to making an album or editing a book – there are many cuts and drafts – each work is carefully considered to assess whether it has its place there. He is objective, critical, articulate yet assured about his work. This assurance comes from the steady, daily process of work, that deep commitment to practice. Climent is immersed in culture and is interested in music – stacks of CDs are in the studio.

When I visit some weeks ago, he is at the point of considering work of various sizes for inclusion in this new Solomon Gallery show, he can be working on 30 or more works at any given time. He is musing on his final edit.

Often, he focuses on one cornerstone to ground his selection. I spot a large new work, Garden Flame and sense a shift – a new direction. I feel privy to a very decisive process of creating conversations and juxtapositions between the works that form this exhibition.

I am instinctively drawn to Climent’s work, his use of colour and form, the natural, architectural and geometric forms. They evoke feelings of quiet reflection and a feeling of placeness while simultaneously being able to evoke our own place-edness. They both ground me and transport me, make me sense belonging and longing, presence and absence.

He is recognised for his use of colour – vibrant, bold and highly evocative. Tom reflects on his use on colour, he associates it with light and links it to part of his family origins in Valencia, Spain – and his interest in light, an essential element in all of Climent’s work. He describes some works as contained spaces, trying to capture light, to contain light within a closed space while others are more rigid and use the order of the colour spectrum. He frequently uses gold paint, symbolic of the
sun – source of light and energy, to be a power source within the paintings.

He is interested in the prism experiments and refraction. Colour is very much part of his DNA. As an artist, he is articulate and quick to refence art historical narratives and influences in his work. His paintings are emerging against a background of looking and studying art. He has been inspired by Henri Matisse, Richard Diebenkorn and Howard Hodgkin. He is generous in acknowledging his peers and his college tutors for supporting his work in the early years.

Climent uses landscape as a means to invite you into a space, to journey somewhere else – sky and land. This is evident for me in Garden Flame which is almost like a portal to another world – a transitional liminal space. Climent is very interested in the journey and in the process of making the works. He describes the process as haphazard at the start, chance and accident play a part as he works on the canvases flat on the floor of the studio, so he doesn’t over control the flow of
materials, but combined with that is a coherent logic. The process involves laying layers of paint on paint, sometimes then sanding back – a very physical process. He uses sand to create textures to convey a sense of work being made from the earth – a lot of choices are being continuously made.

The two forces of chance and logic are always at play in the making of Climent’s work and indeed his mind. They combine to create something dynamic, fresh and transformational. His language and art reference a sort of spiritual, ethereal language of another place, yet it is informed by and references science and logic. That apparent tension is at play or is it a recognition that things are not black and white and the co-existence of logic and spiritualism, of certainty and doubt is
possible – a kind of intuitive knowing unknowing.

He describes the challenge of allowing oneself to be lead without knowing where the end point is – his describes it as a journey. This is evident in works like At Journeys End I See, Future Light and Prophecy.

Climent is clear that the works are not geo specific, he doesn’t reproduce or represent a specific place, yet in the works there is an imprint of the places he has been and felt. Place is a reference point but not a representation of a specific place – the works are a register of places he has been, those that he has experienced and imagines in his mind.

The works grab our attention, while simultaneously suggest we linger, we absorb, slow down. In conversation with Tom, he suggests the works refer to an in-between world, a tentative place. They create opportunities for you to focus on the far horizon while simultaneously draw you close to the immediate surface of the work, the immediate present. The works exist in that perfect space between representation and abstraction – rooted in this world yet pulling you beyond this material
world, light emitting and simultaneously receding.

More recent directions in the work includes softer more organic nature-based shapes – a reaction to earlier geometric sculpture work. These works reference regrowth, nature and are symbolic of life force.

Tom is eloquent, clear and committed to his practice and appreciative for his audience and collectors.

Climent is contributing to the contemporary narrative of painting. This exhibition Land and Longing is pertinent, of our time and urgent. They offer direction yet are not prescriptive, they are open and allow us to journey through them.

I leave feeling re-energised, re-engaged with the world and striving to trust in the possibility of juxtaposition and the coexistence of chance and logic.

Mary McCarthy , Director Crawford Art Gallery