Tom Climent's one-man exhibition is virtually his introduction to Dublin viewers; his career up to this had centred on Cork, his native city, where he still lives and works. The breakthrough came with last year's Victor Treacy Award in Kilkenny (incidentally, I was the judge on that occasion) which he won from an exceptionally strong entry. His present show is a direct follow-on from that.
Climent was born in 1970, the son of a Spanish father who came to Ireland in the 1960s and an Irish mother. His father is a piano teacher who also plays as a professional musician, and his mother met him through attendance at his piano classes. Climent is the eldest of their children - he has a brother and a sister - and went as a schoolboy to Rochestown College. After school he studied engineering for three years, "but I gave it up in degree year for painting."
Why did he do so, and at so late a stage? "Well, I had been going to night classes in painting since I left school and I felt that it was really what I should be doing." So he went to the Crawford School of Art, where the talented Jill Dennis was his degree teacher and Vera Ryan taught him art history. He admits: "I found college hard enough, because I didn't keep sketchbooks or anything like that. In fourth year I had a studio separate from the college, where I could work alone. By that time, I had had enough of college and I just wanted to be separate from it."
The influences of Spanish and Italian art (both Baroque and Renaissance) on his style seem obvious enough, and as a boy he and his family used to visit Spain almost every year. Since then he has been to Florence and Venice; he currently plans to visit Rome as well. Climent reckons, however, that his response to modern art began at school when he saw reproductions of some works by Matisse - "they kind of registered with me. But it was a long time before I felt that this was what I wanted to do. Maybe I had always felt that I would end up doing painting, but it was largely a matter of confidence.
"Painters I used to like at the start were Matisse and Bonnard. In second year I was more into painters like Diebenkorn and Joan Mitchell - I was really into `painterly' people! Though I suppose that I knew their work more from reproductions than from the original. In my fourth year, too, Paddy Graham had a show at the Crawford. They were big pictures, and they sparked off something in me - they had that power ...
"The Abstract Expressionists, the actual way that they painted, on a big scale and with such attack - that draws me to them. But I have never seen their paintings in the original, except in London some years ago. The de Koonings which interest me most are the ones he painted when he moved out into the country." He also admires Francis Bacon, while admitting that he does not care for Bacon's use of paint. "When I began, I just painted in the bedroom at home, on anything I could get. It was not until third year or so that I began to work on a big scale - it is much easier to control a painting on that scale, I find. I use house brushes and things like that, and I work with the canvas laid out on the floor. I painted in acrylic first, and then moved into oils." He does not work from sketches but prefers to attack the canvas premier coup, a technique much used by Baroque artists.
Climent works at his painting full time - he produces about 15 pictures a year, on average - and doesn't think he could paint and keep a full-time job: "I have no ambition to teach." But he does permit himself occasional breaks - "I might take two or three months off, and then I start to paint again. It helps to switch off for a while, and then paintings will slowly start to form in your head. At least, that is how it works for me." He would like to travel and see more paintings in other countries, but he has no wish to live or work abroad, and America does not seem to interest him particularly. The drama and scale of Venetian and Baroque art he finds inspiring, "but I would like to move on to the next thing, take what I have learned and move it on a stage further. I like to think of my work as a two-dimensional space that I can play around with, move it around . . . that is what draws me into painting."
Runs until September 17th
