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.

Mark Ewart’s Article Shifting Sands in The Irish Arts Review | Spring 2020

Tom Climent’s studio is situated in the heart of Cork City, amidst an enclave of old churches and sites of cultural and historical importance. One of these – the nearby Elizabeth Fort – is a physical and metaphorical exclamation – an imposing edifice overlooking the South channel of the river. This 17^th century star-shaped structure, feels like it could be a touchstone for the artist, a 3-dimensional embodiment of his geometric paintings, similarly belonging to another time and place. And it is amongst the surrounding warren of narrow streets, where Climent busies himself making art.

His rich palette of sumptuous colour sings with luminosity and wonder, ethereal cathedrals of kaleidoscopic light that soar ever upwards. Add to this his broad repertoire of paint application techniques and we begin to understand why the artist’s work is so widely admired by artists and the public alike. Indeed, the accolades came early in Climent’s career. Upon graduation from CIT Crawford College of Art & Design in 1995, the inspirational art historian and former Crawford lecturer Vera Ryan, selected his work for the Victor Treacy Award at the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny. This was closley followed by the bestowal of the Tony O’Malley Award; next the esteemed art critic Brian Fallon, selected his paintings for a Dublin show and continued to champion him as an emerging artist. 

The early work that gained this attention was grounded in the study of art history and it was in lectures at CIT CCAD where Climent soaked up artists like Cy Twombly, Frank Auerbach and Patrick Graham. And while pouring over books in the college library, a chance encounter with a painting after Manet by Helen Frankenthaler, along with an ongoing admiration for Rembrandt, proved pivotal.  ‘I’d been to the Rijksmuseum a few years previously and had seen Rembrandt, his work had really made an impression on me. The painterliness of it, the looseness of the way he handled paint and yet conveyed something real and living.’ 1. This notion of looking to the great masters was an important moment and it went on to shape his Degree year paintings, which appropriated compositions by Caravaggio, Velazquez and Degas, such as in Black Supper (After Caravaggio) 1995.

In recent years, the influence of other artists has become largely incidental, as intuition and internalised memory play a deliberate part of his working process, where ideas are arrived at gradually and without the need for a grand plan. It is only at the middle and latter stages of a paintings evolution, that Climent very consciously starts to moderate shape, texture and colour. ‘In a way what I’m trying to do’ he explains, ‘is to search for an order or pattern in systems that appear to be random and chaotic.’ 2.

In a painting such as Transceiver: Oil & plaster on canvas, 2019, the structure seems to leach out from underneath a myriad of layers, as if paint is peeled back to reveal the skeleton on which colour and texture are scaffolded. The structures have become increasingly articulate and perhaps it was not entirely unexpected to learn that before attending art college, Climent studied engineering. An early love for the interrelationship between art and science hints at an interest in technical drawing systems and the elegance of formal structure. ‘Yes, I think the work I make now comes from two places. It combines logic and structure and also chance and accident. I do use geometric shapes as a starting point, overlapping several in one painting to see what comes out and what is being suggested to me.’ But there is also he explains, a subliminal process at work, where action painting takes over – while the canvas is on the floor – relinquishing some control to allow paint to move under its own momentum.

Climent’s reverence of formal structure is matched only by his effortless instinct for colour. Of course, colour appreciation is subjective, but it is hard to imagine anyone who would not be attracted to his palette. Encapsulating everything from iridescent pink, to ponderous grey-brown, oftentimes, such unexpected combinations, live side-by-side on the same canvas. But is there a metric to how he constructs colour relationships and do they arrive from observation or imagination? ‘A lot of my recent work comes from the way light is composed by colours of the spectrum, when light passes through a prism…what I’m trying to do is paint light.’ He goes on to explain that his colour choices are ‘purely intuitive’ and in his recent work in particular, such as Bright Star: Oil, plaster & sand on canvas, 2019, richer and brighter colours appear at the pinnacle of the forms, as if illuminated from above.

These recent paintings appear to edge more and more away from pure abstraction, as the forms increasingly read as landscapes, where human habitations or glacial moraines nestle into mountains and fields. Indeed, a sense of place has had a strong bearing upon the artists life, shaped partly by his connections with the Mediterranean. This must go some way to explain his predilection for azure and burnt orange. ‘Yes, very much so…having spent a lot of my childhood in Spain..’ (his Father is from Valencia on the east coast) ‘…it influenced how I perceive colour. My memories of Spain contain a brightness, when I think of it, it’s that intensity of light that I bring to my own work.’

The elements of earth, air and water in Climent’s paintings seem to surround the viewer as aerial perspective draws the eye to distant horizons. A renewed interest in experimenting with texture and paint is bringing tactility of the landscape, even more to the forefront. ‘I’ve been using sand and plaster a lot’ he reveals, where ‘this attention to the surface is almost like a painting within a painting. I think it’s an analogy for this idea of searching for something, of trying to uncover something that is hidden and bringing it to the surface. There a sense then the surfaces are like the archaeology of the painting.’

This analogy for digging into the past, while aspiring for something brave, bold and new, fits neatly. And it is an echo once again of the City around him as it physically changes under a crisscross of cranes against the skyline.  One hopes that such changes will not impose too much upon Tom in his studio, where he can continue to let his painting do the talking. ‘I think for me painting has become my means of communicating with the world, of letting people know a little bit about myself that I can’t express in any other way. I think this is a common aspiration for most people who work in a creative way.  I’ve always wanted people to be able to enter into my paintings…to create something three dimensional…’ In a career so far defined by enduring dedication and a genuine love for making art – Climent’s paintings certainly do speak with great fluency.

1.Artists’ Talk with Coilin Murray, Liss Ard Estate, Skibbereen, Co. Cork March / July 2016

2. Interview with Tom Climent, Friday 8th Nov 2019 and all subsequent quotes from the artist.

Mark Ewart is a Lecturer in Art Education at CIT Crawford College of Art and Design. He is also an art teacher at Ashton School and a writer based in Cork City.