Sorcha Dallas

In a 1984 essay ‘Images’, the poet Robert Hass recalls a line from Chekhov’s notebooks as he contemplates the discreet power and intense pleasure of an image that arises sans explanation or narrative explication. In one of a series of isolated entries, the doctor wrote: “They were mineral bottles with preserved cherries in them.” Hass notes how the lack of context intensifies the sentence. At the same time, and paradoxically, the exactness of Chekhov’s description, the concreteness of the objects and the relationship that he describes, seems to summon abstract, nearly philosophical concerns. Hass writes, “What we see clearly is not perhaps the heart of the reality toward which the image leaps, but the quiet attention that is the form of the impulse to leap.” The meaning of the image per se is less the point than the focusing power of an image so well honed.

In the sculpture ‘Untitled’ (2006), the young Mexico City artist Martin Soto Climent has created a material cousin to Chekhov’s jewel-like image, one that possesses the power Hass points to. Three clear glass bottles sit on the floor, arranged in a kind of triangle. A tangled mess of necklaces circles their slim throats. The bottles lean away from one another, and the chains that connect them – like spokes to an absent wheel – are taut, meeting in a central knot that holds the vessels in a fixed but unsettling relation. So tethered, their sculptural forms exude the beauty and solitude that dependence unexpectedly creates. When installing the work, Climent uses the blank gallery like Chekhov uses the blank page, evoking the same startle; the piece is as pared down and suggestive as the fragment of poetry it seems to twin.

Most of Climent’s artworks – like ‘Untitled’ – are made of found materials placed (balanced, never secured) in powerful accord with one another. Shoes, hats, gloves, soccer balls, eggs, dishes, venetian blinds (twisted and torqued to resemble huge wings in ‘Movement 1’ and ‘Movement 2’, both 2006), and tires (which featured in a recent show at Vilma Gold in London) all figure in works where the tension among materials, or the tension between materials’ original states and their slight alteration, is paramount but invariably: the relationships may read as troubled, sensuous, contemplative, or funny. The artist, born in 1977, finds most of his materials while circumnavigating the Mexican capital either on foot or in his old VW van. This reliance on chance lies at one pole of Climent’s method; the other, his sense of order, is suggested by his training: at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, he studied architecture, then industrial design. The designer’s touch is evident in Climent’s exquisite display tactics and deft manipulation of disparate materials to rangy, evocative effect. Beyond specific narrative signifiers, however, he incises in his works a vision of the world as split – and constantly in a state of flux between its dichotomies. His works are powered by fraught moments of convergence – between materials, narratives, genders, bodies, - and they take, as Hass might say, the “form of the impulse to leap.”

Climent’s works are as formally composed by what is present as by what is not: the body. The materials he uses fairly hum with its absence, and given his emphasis on duality, that body is almost invariably a gendered one. The artist’s myriad works with shoes, fetish objects par excellence, are all examples. ‘Paseo Ensimismado’ (Stroll Becomes Absorbed in Thought, 2006), in which men’s leather dress shoes are arranged in a circle, the toe of each stuffed into the shoe that it follows, recalls the Ouroboros, the Gnostic symbol of a serpent consuming its own tail (symbolizing closed systems and the uniting of the conscious and unconscious mind, among other readings), while also suggesting the humour of a motley of professional men tripping over one another on their way to work. The sexier – and more violent – ‘Deep Heel 1’ (2006) features two pairs of similarly vintage high heels arranged in the opposite manner: the heel of one is thrust into the next shoe’s narrow toe with the whole assemblage lying on its side to create, from above, a kind of choked, rough-trod star, as has been noted, a swastika. The genders converge in ‘Meeting’ (2005), which appeared in a group show at New York’s Broadway 1602 gallery last fall. Here a pair of ivory-coloured high heels stands on the floor, toes touching and “ankles” apart, with an ancient, darkened bicycle seat rising between them. Its rusty springs spread the pale shoes, suggesting the moment just prior to intercourse; at the same time the object as a whole simultaneously evokes both male and female genitalia. Climent moves fluidly between the sexes, finding no reason why one body, or one body of work, cannot include both.

Climent’s preference for common, discarded materials and for the hand-crafted would appear to place him well within, first, the main current of contemporary Latin American art and, more directly, the buzzy Mexico City art scene, which has made well-documented use of the city’s abundant trash and rampant commercialism. His sculptures, however, have little to do with the kind of wry commentary on consumerism and waste made by artists like Damian Ortega (for whom Climent once worked as a studio assistant), Gabriel Kuri, and Santiago Sierra. The shadow of Gabriel Orozco looms large, not only because it must over any contemporary Mexican artist with contemporary tendencies. Orozco’s early assemblages made from street detritus, as well as his more recent monumental works, carry the same warm yet stringent trace of a romantic modernist who rejects narrative even while his materials seem to invite it. Climent shares, too, Orozco’s precedent in Surrealist objects. Meret Oppenheim’s famous fur-covered teacup, for example, is a close ancestor of Climent’s ‘Untitled’ (2005), in which milk is filled to the very brim of a delicate porcelain cup, rendering the porcelain and the milk indistinguishable and the cup a closed system. The fiercely playful politics of Oppenheim’s ‘Object’ (1936), oft-read as a vulva offering itself up for a sip, is at odds with Climent’s version: he makes it as smooth and palatable as possible, underlining Oppenheim’s point about fear of sex, of female bodies, but then in a twist closes it off to any potential takers.

The pull of dreams and unreason on Climent’s work, is, though, always balanced by meticulousness and order. The organizing conceit of his first New York solo last winter, also at Broadway 1602, was a chessboard at the moment of checkmate; the gallery was a discerning and game arrangement in black and white. The implications – poetic, philosophical, political – of chess were well-mined by the 20th-century avant-garde, with Beckett’s ‘Endgame’ and the 1944 exhibition “The Imagery of Chess” at Julien Levy Gallery in New York being only two grand examples. But the game’s most ardent fan, of course, was “Imagery” co-organizer Marcel DuChamp, who famously left the art-world to pursue it. For both Climent the designer and Climent the philosopher, the appeal of chess, a match of relationships laid out in a beautifully devised order, seems obvious. The gallery’s floor held a floor arrangement of eight objects lined up in a row. Each was named after a chess piece, then given a subtitle that imbued the object with something more subjective, ‘Black Tower: Quiet Moment’ features a black bowling ball sidling up to a diminutive white egg; ‘White Horse: Dressed Ball’, a soccer ball covered in the skin of another; ‘Black Bishop: Light Memory’, a black bowler hat – shades of Magritte – with white string webbed across it; ‘White Queen: The Bare Presence’, a folded tuxedo shirt; and so on. In a hallway, a pair of leather gloves, one black and one white, threaded fingers. In its entwining of opposites, this image speaks to the spectrum of Climent’s concerns: dialectical relationships, the formal design that their synthesis takes, the poetry that these moments conjure, and the hidden meaning that can arise from such juxtapositions. Picture DuChamp and his mirror Rrose Selavy holding hands, as it were. The name of DuChamp’s alter ego puns on “Eros, c’est la vie!” Climent’s lovely, resounding works – which gleam with their maker’s sweetness and seriousness of purpose – enjoin their viewers to concur with the view of the world that Rrose’s name slyly suggests.