Art in America Review
The following article was written by Edward J. Sullivan and published in the December, 1997, issue of Art in American.
Elena Climent at Mary-Anne Martin Gallery
Mexican painter Elena Climent now lives in Chicago, but her affinities for her childhood home have become stronger in the last several years. Her latest exhibition showed the artist s quirky personal take on the rooms in the house where she grew up in Mexico City. When her Brooklyn-born mother died in 1994. Climent believed that the house would be sold to strangers, so she spent a week there alone, painting intimate corners, shelves, kitchen cabinets and other small spaces in a way that recalls a child's discovery of the contents of her mothers dresser drawers. Although there is a visual and emotional affinity with some of the still lifes of Maria Izquierdo (a contemporary of Frida Kahlo whose own work was on view at the Americas Society galleries in New York at the time of Climent's show), she rejects the facile folkloric elements present in many of the works of the Mexican School painters of the 1930s and 40s. In her paintings, traditional Mexican ceramics are replaced by soda bottles and garish plastic kitchen ware, while the harmonious colors of pictures by Kahlo or Rufino Tamayo are supplanted by the discordant tones of modern Mexican mass-produced culture.
There were 35 paintings on view, 16 in oil on canvas or board and 19 watercolors (the most intimate works in the show). Each was rendered in the artist's signature style, blending Photo-Realism with a hint of self-conscious (and often ironic) naivete; they represent her coming to grips with the end of childhood, the onset of middle age and the death of her parents. Ciment is a self-taught artist (her father believed that formal training would ruin her technique), and one can sense in these exquisitely rendered images that she has turned the struggles with form and composition very much to her advantage. While many individual elements are repeated from one painting to another, tediousness is scrupulously avoided through the profusion and variety of objects as well as the multiplicity of views and angles from which they are depicted.
Climent's father, Spanish emigre painter Enrique Climent, and her mother, Helen, are present in many of these images via depictions of family photographs. The extended family (which is both Spanish and Eastern European) is suggested through the artist's subtle renditions of yellowed, cracking photos of long-deceased aunts, uncles and distant cousins, as in Altar for the Day of the Dead and Night Table with Objects. The books, letters and all sorts of mundane objects that constituted the everyday baggage of the household are at the heart of these pictures. Bundles of letters form an important leitmotif in many of them. Each envelope and postcard contains, we imagine, an important (yet unknowable) fragment of family history. References to the artist's dual heritage, Jewish and Christian, are present in some of these works such as Shelf with Orange Peels, which includes a menorah. In other paintings, death is alluded to as in Mosaic Table with Mirror a work which juxtaposes several papier mache skeletons with two vases of marigolds, a flower signifying mourning in traditional Mexican culture.
Climent's paintings are about memory, but they are as much about accepting how memory is changed and altered as we grow older. They are also about letting go of those things which will never return. Perhaps the best thing about these pictures is that while they represent the end product of a personal journey, the artist was able to avoid the trap of melancholic sentimentality. Some of the works in the show, which was titled "To My Parents," are ironic and funny, embracing without apology or nostalgia the oddball qualities not only of Climent's parents daily existence but those of everyone else's.