Elena Climent

Elena Climent was born in Mexico City in 1955, the daughter of the Spanish artist Enrique Climent. She is basically a self-taught artist. She copied works of art, studied anatomy in books, sketched, visited museums, and experimented with color.

Her style of painting is called, “still life.” A still life is a painting of objects such as fruit, flowers, or food, often in a home setting. Ms. Climent sees the beauty in everyday objects and captures that beauty in her paintings.

She carefully collects and arranges the everyday objects that appear in her work. Everything in them provides a warm feeling of life, art and Mexican culture. What are some of the items you see in this painting?

For Ms. Climent, her paintings represent feelings through objects and she thinks of them as stories even though the viewer may not necessarily be aware of it.

Her paintings show with tenderness the way even the poorest Mexicans beautify their surroundings with improvised decorations, such as vases made out of Coke bottles wrapped in used gift paper or old cans recycled as flower pots.

When her mother died in Mexico City in 1994 and the family home was sold, Ms. Climent set out to record its contents in paintings. Rather than show entire rooms, though, she created an image of her parents through the details of their lives.

In some cases, their presence is plainly shown, as in a painting with snapshots standing on a night table.

In others, their presence is understood from grouped objects like books, letters, household items and toys from the artist’s childhood. All of the objects in these paintings have a symbolic meaning which means that they represent something else.

Ms. Climent’s paintings of her father’s bookcase describe her father through his personal belongings: a little ship might suggest his immigration from Spain to Mexico; a color chart his profession as an artist; the dark grid of the shelves a tough, firm personality.

Ms. Climent’s “Childhood” paintings may be related to the fascination on the part of a large sector of the Mexican population, with miniatures. In markets and corner stands one can often find any number of tiny objects.

While traditional miniatures are now mainly tourist items in Mexico, the popularity of small things still remains, as can be seen by the large number of tiny plastic dolls and toys that are easily available to children.

In her pictures, Ms. Climent uses this appeal of tiny objects to recall past times in her life. She thinks of her paintings as "windows on memories.” Do you recognize the open book in this painting?

Elena Climent now lives in New York where she painted this mural, made up of six separate panels, at New York University to honor six authors who spent some or all of their careers in New York.