Pilgrim is a fitting title for Tom Climent’s new exhibition of paintings at the Solomon Gallery in Dublin. There is always a spiritual element to his work, a sense that he is pushing forward on some sort of quest or journey.
Climent is based in Cork, living in Blackrock and working from the same studio in the city centre he has used for the past thirty years. There’s a storage space on the ground floor, and a narrow wooden staircase that leads upstairs to where he works. “It’s good to be in town,” he says. “If I need anything in the art shop, it’s close by. Or I can meet somebody for a coffee or go for lunch.”
Pilgrim is his twenty-ninth solo exhibition. His first was at the Blackcombe Gallery in Cork in 1994, when he was still a student at the Crawford College of Art and Design. His current paintings are largely abstract, with elements of architecture, landscape and other forms from the natural world, but his work at that time was more figurative. “The painters I loved back then were Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud,” he says. “I suppose when you’re starting off as a student, you almost want to paint like the artists you admire.”
He soon took a greater interest in the abstract expressionists. “People like Jackson Pollock, who worked on the floor. There was a kind of stream of consciousness, and a performative aspect, to the way I used to paint back then. I still paint on the floor a lot, but the way I work now is totally different. It’s a lot more structured, and I work more slowly. If you were to see a painting from thirty years ago and a painting from today, there’s quite a difference to how they’re made and how they look.”
Tom Climent, Burst, oil and plaster on board, 41 x 56cm.
Climent has always loved colour. “It’s something I feel you get to understand through trial and error. In those earlier paintings, I used a lot of dark sections, and I suppose that made the colours around them seem brighter. Whereas now, I don’t do that anymore. I use colour – I hope – in its purest sense. For me, colour is very much connected to light, you know. So a lot of the time, it's like I'm trying to capture light or create light within the paintings I make.
“You probably know that kind of science experiment, when you have a prism and the light goes through it, and there’s a refraction to the colour spectrum? It shows you that light contains all the colours of the spectrum. A lot of what I'm trying to do is to work with light, and using colour to convey that.”
Growing up, Climent spent most of his summers in Spain. His father Angel, a musician from Valencia, arrived in Cork in 1961 to succeed Aloys Fleischmann as organist and choirmaster at the Cathedral of St Mary and St Anne. He later taught at Cork School of Music, and married one of his students, Myra Comer. Tom Climent is the eldest of their three children.
Valencia has, he acknowledges, been a major influence on his work. “Oh, very much so, yeah,” he says. “Teaching at the School of Music, my dad was off for three months in the summer, and we used to go over a lot. I think the intensity of the light in Valencia has definitely affected my sense of colour and how I work.”
The landscapes of Ireland, and further afield, have also inspired much of his recent output. “Sometimes when I'm driving around, I kind of think, God, that looks like one of my pieces. I don't really do sketches, but I take photographs for reference. For me, working as an artist or being creative is almost like allowing the sense of those landscapes, or places I've been to, to come out in the work in their own way.
"The paintings have suggestions of places and maybe feelings or emotions or experiences. I don’t want to recreate a place and say, this is West Cork, or somewhere specific. But landscapes leave an imprint, and then they become their own thing, and that’s kind of what I want in my work.”
Tom Climent at work in his Cork studio.
Climent was not always as committed to art as he is now. When he first left school, he began training as an engineer. “I was very young, just 17,” he says, “and I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do. I studied engineering because I liked maths and science, and maybe if I had done something else to do with science, I might have stuck with it. You can see I still have that interest in structure and logic in some of the work I do. My interest in geometric shapes probably has that connection.”
He had studied art in school, and he began attending night classes with Jo Allen at the Crawford. “Sadly, Jo has since passed on. But she was very supportive; she encouraged me to keep painting. So I decided to leave engineering and go to art college. It felt like the right thing to do at the time, though there were times when I kind of said, oh, am I mad? I’m sure my parents thought I was. But obviously I'm glad how it's worked out. You can't predict anything, I suppose.”
Over the years, Climent has shown in New York and London, as well in Australia and China, and Pilgrim is his fifth solo exhibition with the Solomon Gallery. “We do a show every two years,” he says. “And that really suits me. Even when this show finishes, I know there’ll be another in two years. That gives me a kind of focus point to work towards.”
- Tom Climent, Pilgrim runs at the Solomon Gallery, Dublin, until 25th May.
