---

Alannah Hopkins | Cork Arts Fest | The Irish Examiner | 2000

Tom shows his strength by hitting the canvas

Tom Climent was the featured artist of Cork Institute of Technology’s Arts Fest 200. His new work was at Gallery 44, MacCurtain Street, Cork, and consisted of five large works in oil and acrylic, two series of abstracts and a pair of watercolours.

Since graduating from the Crawford College of Art in 1994, Tom has been painting full-time and his works, generally on a very large scale, are much sought after by collectors.

The new series marks a change of direction, towards a more expressive less figurative style.

Tom describes the work as a return to the works inspired by Caravaggio and Rembrandt that hang in the Farmgate Restaurant in Cork’s indoor market.

Worship, the largest of the big works at 8’ x 6’, is a bravura performance, using paint directly from the tube in impasto to suggest the outline of a red kneeling figure and a blue lectern. The whole canvas is primed in acrylic in earthy tones which are then painted over in oil to create a background of considerable depth.

The sense of space and depth of background is an outstanding feature of Beloved.

The shape of a bed in an interior room is contained within an series of angles and shadows.

A block of bright red in the foreground leaps out at the viewer, while a dark window in the background leads the viewer in to the picture.

Bedrock features another bed shape, but the title indicates its ambiguity: is it a bed or a rock?

Tom does not work from preliminary sketches, but prefers to paint directly on to the canvas, letting the paint and the way it flows dictate the eventual form of the painting.

This process is evident in Baby Buddha, a study in luscious reds, yellows and orange, with its contrasts of round and sharp edges and its highly worked surfaces.

The smaller, more abstract works in two series are based on small sections or corners of the larger paintings – variations on the same theme. But they lack the flow and spontaneity of the larger works.

In contrast, Tom’s venture into water-colour, a new departure, is a very welcome change of direction. The two Golden Butterfly paintings have a lightness of touch that echoes the spontaneity and the delight in colour of the larger works on a smaller more intimate scale.

Mark Ewart | Cork Arts Fest | The Irish Times | 2000

Now in its eight year, Cork Institute of Technology’s Arts Fest offers a diverse mix of activities including music, literature, theatre and film. On the visual arts front, four exhibitions are each scheduled for rather short runs, including an extremely evocative body of work by Ben Riley showing at the Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh.

It is Tom Climent, though, who is the feature artist of the festival — a move all the more welcome considering that this exhibition is a return to from after his last solo show two years ago. Here we see again those bold and vital canvases which originally brought the artist acclaim.

The art-historical references which informed earlier work were less obvious here, as other starting-points open up, most notably the serendipitous discoveries made during the painting process. In many cases, you would need inside knowledge to determine the exact origin of the imagery (although the titles offer some hints). That said, trying to impose order and clarity on the abstraction is certainly a vital part of the complicated equation that is Climent’s painting.

Two series’ of smaller paintings stem directly from the compositions and colour schemes of the large works. It’s a useful developmental strategy that has borne some interesting results, particularly in the Beloved series, in which overtures to post-painterly abstraction are starting to creep in . This series shows Climent’s ability to exercises alternatives: on one hand, the paint can be deeply sensuous and vibrant; on the other it is a translucent medium which opens doors to intangible, disorienting spaces.

Hillary Pyle | Tony O’Malley Award Winner | The Irish Times | 1998

Innocent desire of award winner

CORK-BASED artist Tom Climent has been announced as winner of the inaugural Tony O’Malley Award at the James Joyce Centre in Dublin.

Over 40 painters from north and south of Ireland submitted work to Kilkenny’s Butler Gallery with proposals as to what they would do with the £2,000 travel grant, meaning stiff competition for the young Cork artist.

Runners-up Barbara Freeman from Belfast, who has been transcribing musical compositions by Cage and Messaien into colour and space, and Robert Armstrong, imaging water and in particular the frozen pond at the Botanic Gardens in Dublin, were present when the judge’s decision was made public.

The Award, which will be presented annually, honours the 84 – year-old Kilkenny artist Tony O’Malley, who only recently presented a major exhibition of past and present work at the Royal Hibernian Academy. Sponsors of the award, Waterford Crystal, see their role of encouraging the visual arts in Ireland as an important one, and welcome the opportunity that the award will give artists to travel.

Tom Climent, winner of the Victor Treacy Award in 1996, intends to put the grant towards a visit to Italy to study the work of old masters. Much of his work has been inspired by artists such as Titian, Tintoretto, and Carravaggio, and not surprisingly, since he is half Spanish, by Velasquez and Goya. He will travel to Florence, Venice and Rome and his named Velasquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X in the Palazzo Doria Pamphii as a work – apart from the Caravaggios -that he particularly wants to see.

Butler Gallery, The Castle, Kilkenny, Ireland                www.butlergallery.com

Alannah Hopkins | Review of Dancing Parade | Triskel Arts Centre | The Sunday Times | 1998

To say that Dancing Parade consists of a series of paintings inspired by Degas gives little idea of what an exciting achievement it is. Al the works are, broadly speaking, variations on that familiar image of the ballerina at the barre.

Climent’s ballet dancer is more abstract than the Degas figure and is often suggested by an almost transparent play of planes and light as in The Swan Dancer, left. The studio is painted in shades of green and yellow, and a panel of light on the left appears to be a mirror reflecting light from a window.

Dancing Parade, a series of four medium-sized canvasses in oil and acrylic, concentrates on the movement of the dancers, progressing towards an ever more simplified mode in which the figures become less clearly represented, more implied. The triumph of the show is a series of nine paintings that start and end apparently as abstracts. The “abstract” is revealed to be grounded in a detail of the now-familiar studio, which materialises before our eyes, and is then taken away again. The series is a brilliant illustration of how an artist creates illusion and moves between apparent abstraction and representation.

Triskel Arts Centre, Tobin Street, Cork City, Ireland            www.triskelartscentre.ie

Isabel Healy | Review of Dancing Parade | Triskel Arts Centre | The Irish Examiner | 1998

Tom Climent’s new exhibition is a move to more subtle work by the popular artist

MORE than almost any other artist emerging from Cork, Tom Climent has a loyal following. Even before he graduated from the Crawford College of Art in 1995, Tom was already exhibiting, and his large, vibrant canvases, influenced by Velasquez and Goya, were selling well.

In 1996 he won the Victor Treacy Award from the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny and in 1997 the Tony O’Malley Award and a residency in Lithuania. To date, Tom has had work in nine group shows and held one exhibition in Dublin and two in the Blackcombe in Cork, but his latest, Dancing Parade, is his first in the Triskel Arts Centre.

Familiar with his work and anticipating more of the same, the fans flocked to the opening last week only to find Tom had moved from the hot rumbustiousness of Spain to the cool stylishness of France: a new, flatter canvas, a lighter brush stroke, a quieter voice and a more mellow palette.

Born in Cork into a musical family (half Irish, half Spanish) Tom Climent studied electrical engineering after school and his parents were alarmed when he chucked in his printed circuit boards for paints and brushed the year he was due to qualify at the CIT.

Tom wanted to be an artist and he started his new path at the Crawford in 1991. Through his studies he was drawn to the painters of his father’s country and began producing interiors thickly worked in dark colours stabbed with bright reds and yellows, depicting life and lusty living in a style between abstract and figurative.

Now 28, Tom has a good business head and is confident in his work; yet shy, never pushy, he sees himself as developing and moving on from what was a lucrative and energetic style and approach.

“I follow my instincts and painting has to be exciting. I don’t want to be a prisoner of my work, I can only paint what I feel like painting and maybe I just got bored”, he says. “People say it takes 10 years to find a voice, I am only out of college a few years and am really only starting off, trying different stuff and different strands are coming together.

The Triskel show, which runs until August 24, is an exercise in composition and structure influenced by Degas’ dancers. The paintings of abstract figures in interior aces are, in the main, smaller than Climent’s previous works, but he compensates for this by producing two series of four and nine paintings, saying that the scale is still the same but the details are just in several pieces rather than one big one.

“The earlier work is chaotic, everything was all together”, says Tom, who wanted to take out and examine different aspects in sequence.

He consciously wanted to produce a series and picked green – almost randomly – as a background colour from which to work, deliberately making the texture flatter so that the paint itself would not constitute a distraction from the images on the canvases, leaving only a miasma of their movement. Sometimes unsure how the finished series would fit together, he was delighted to find that the Triskel provided the perfect space for the result the was trying to achieve.

There are 15 paintings but, in effect, only four when taken in series. The individual paintings cost £2,600 (four have already sold) and the series cost£2,000 each but the artist does not want to break up the groups despite the fact that it could hinder impulse sales based on love at first sight.

Though he always likes figures in context, the dancers are not altogether important, the overall movement and composition is what matters.

The work is subtle, quiet and reserved compared to his lusty and noisy Spanish-influenced work.

The artist does not differentiate, however, between Spanish and French. He notes different strands, rather than taking ideas from the masters.“I’m just content to be in the whole tradition of painting. I like loads of different paintings but what I learn from them is not always obvious. It is normal to be influenced, to take stuff on board.”

Then he adds, somewhat uncomfortably: “I’m not mad about talking that much. I’d prefer people to come in and see for themselves”.

He is actually echoing Edgar Degas: “The artist does not draw what he sees, but what he must make others see”.

Triskel Arts Centre, Tobin Street, Cork City, Ireland                www.triskelartscentre.ie

Ciara Ferguson | Review of Pure | Temple Bar Gallery & Studios | The Sunday Independent | 1997

Celebrating Climent

One could be suspicious of the amount of hype surrounding 27-year-old Cork artist Tom Climent. After all this is his first show in Dublin and he is only two years out of the Crawford College. But that wouldn’t be fair. Having seen the exhibition in the Temple Bar Gallery I see what the fuss is about.

While Climent himself is quiet and reserved, and apparently uncomfortable with the attention, his canvasses tell a different story. Vibrant and luscious layers of colour, semi-abstract, semi-figurative, these paintings possess a confidence and self-assurance that belies his lack of experience.

“The paintings are my alter ego”, he says “They enable me to express myself. I want people to walk into a room and just want to look at them”.

Tom Climent is from Douglas, Cork, where he has his studio. He started painting while still in school after becoming mesmerized by a Matisse picture. After school he studied engineering for three years before finally coming around to the fact that painting was what he really wanted to do. For four years he studied at the Crawford and has had two solo shows in Cork. Last year he won the Victor Treacy Critics’ choice award which resulted in the current show.

“I’ve been working at it ten years but it is only in the last two years that things have begun to happen”, he says.

The provocative hedonistic titles like Near Wild Heaven, Your Blue Room and Spanish Elegy became the inspiration for the paintings. Sometimes I read something in a magazine or a book or hear a line from a song and think that would make a nice title. Then I start to think about the painting but it is the actual process of applying paint that works out the painting.

The work of the old Spanish masters like Velasquez and Goya are a strong influence. “My Dad is Spanish so I think I tend naturally towards the Spanish painters. I don’t particularly admire anything from this century.”

“I think you have to have a hunger to pursue a life of painting because financially it’s very difficult. Once I made the choice there was no going back. The hype doesn’t really make any difference to what I do. Selling is great (most of the show sold before the opening) but it’s not why you do it. That’s why it’s good that I live and work in Cork. It keeps my feet planted firmly on the ground”.

Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, 5-9 Temple Bar, Dublin 2, Ireland                      www.templebargallery.com