Embracing Life's objects.

• Author: Bach, Caleb
• Position: Mexican painter Elena Climent

In canvases of vivid detail, this Mexican painter unites elements across space and time, evoking an immediate personal reality

TO ENTER THE HOME of Mexican painter Elena Climent is to step into one of her paintings. I visited her in February, pummeled by the incessant snows of winter in Chicago, where she now lives, but upon crossing the threshold of her apartment, warm, moist breezes of her native land began to blow. Steam radiators and a welcoming cup of coffee may have been responsible, but my emotional thermometer rose upon spotting everywhere; the actual papier-mache skeletons, pup-pets, and articulated munecas, also vintage toys, polychromed santitos, and other popular artifacts found in Climent's paintings. Dried and fresh flowers, plants in every corner, and vines carefully trained along the walls reinforced the feeling of more temperate climes, but most evocative of Mexico was a series of nineteenth-century lottery cards replicated upon the kitchen cupboard doors. Climent, friendly, informal, thoughtful, immediately confessed she is ruled by urgent impulses: to feel is to paint. "I wanted to decorate the kitchen cabinets. I was inspired by some photos I found in an issue of Artes tie Mexico devoted to games of chance."

Climent reveals herself as an acutely sensitized visual scavenger, an artist who creates highly personalized realities by combining bits of places where she lives, has lived, or even hopes to live with meticulous replications of books, photographs, or other objects associated with events or relationships in her life. Although each item carries a specific emotional load for Climent--it's the propellant that compels her to reproduce them--her paintings speak about experiences common to most people, hence they provoke an immediate, visceral response.

"Do you think we are what we have?" I ask. "Not exactly," she responds. "But I think wherever we are we reproduce ourselves. People reflect themselves by their surroundings. We create an order around us, a mirror of what we are. I'm fascinated by what objects; absorb people." Rarely does Climent paint outright portraits of people but rather depicts them indirectly by way of settings they occupy and cherished possessions kept close at hand. Employing remarkable technique, often she does duplicate snapshots or little paintings of individuals, mostly family members, but these likenesses cohabit shelves, counters, and tabletops with myriad books, letters, clippings, and other personal items. Her tableaux, which often unite the sublime with the banal (a Leonardo reproduction, for example, next to a bottle of hair spray), also suggest that from the fringes of our awareness, as we focus on tasks at hand, objects constantly but mutely bombard us like bits of visual static. But in the other sense of the word, the items she paints are not static, but best categorized as "unstill lifes." Although the inclusion of elements like half-consumed beverages, lit candles, and an open drawer reflect human activity under way, many objects provoke an unsettling sense of loss and pain.

Climent would be the first to admit that, her formative years were full of confusing, contradictory issues of identity through which she continues to work and about which she has written candidly. "My father was a prominent artist, a refugee from Franco's Spain," she says. "He was sharing a studio in Barcelona, and one day a bomb fell on the building. All tangled up under a table, he survived but, fed up, at age forty-two, he walked out with the clothes on his back, first to France via the Pyrenees; eventually he arrived in Mexico City to start his life anew. He met my mother eight years later, while she was visiting Mexico as a tourist. She was a Jewish lady from Brooklyn, much younger than my father, from a working-class background. Ultimately she abandoned her origins, married out of her faith, against her father's wishes. So my two sisters and I had parents who were both foreign to Mexico. No cousins, uncles. My father's life was cut off due to the war. His father had been a Fascist, so there was that added division. Spain was like the other...