(“Procession – Exodus” by Clinton de Menezes)
Virginia MacKenny
mourns the tragic death of friend and colleague, artist Clinton de Menezes, who
was shot in Durban in the early hours of the morning of December 31, 2013.
Clinton De Menezes
was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1970. After gaining his B-Tech in
Fine Art at the then Technikon Natal, he went on to achieve his Masters Degree
in Fine Art from the Durban Institute of Technology in 2004 under the
supervision of Tony Starkey.
In his early years
as a young artist, he exhibited regularly, participating in the FLAT Gallery,
which provided a literal and intellectual home for many young artists in Durban
who went on to make a name for themselves internationally. He also exhibited at
the KZNSA Gallery and the Durban Art Gallery.
Deeply involved in
the art life of Durban during this period, he served on the exhibitions
committee for Durban’s innovative Red Eye Art Collective 1998-2002 and the
KwaZulu-Natal Society of the Arts (KZNSA) from 2003 to 2004. Always keen to
share his love of art, he was the co-founder of The Art and Sculpture Studio
where he co-ordinated and facilitated drawing and painting workshops for adult
learners. He also provided an alternative space for artists as curator of The
Cupboard Gallery.
Unlike many artists who veer off into other
industries in order to survive, de Menezes resolutely stayed with his practice
sharing his knowledge, exhibiting and seeking commissions. In 2004, de Menezes
founded Alchemy Studios, a company established to fabricate artwork for private
and public spaces. In 2007, he relocated to the United Kingdom to actively
market Alchemy Studios and to pursue his career in Fine Art in a larger arena.
Primarily a
landscape painter, de Menezes was fascinated by the way history was held in,
and below, the surface of the visible terrain. Visiting the battlefields of
KwaZulu-Natal where the Anglo-Zulu War and the South African War between the
Boers and the British played themselves out, he became highly cognisant of the
politics of land contestation in South Africa. In response he developed a
vocabulary of archetypal figures that included the soldier and the traveller
and a working method of embedding objects in and on his paintings. Allusions to
conflict, burial and excavation on both a socio-political and personal level
came to typify his work.
De Menezes’
practice expanded from painting and drawing to performance, installation and
altered photography. Gradually he built his reputation exhibiting in the UK,
Germany and the US. In 2010 he exhibited Procession
(Exodus) in the exhibition Hearts and
Minds curated by Thomas Dry Barry for the Savannah School of Art and Design
at the Africa on My Mind symposium.
De Menezes’s Procession renders the
broad trek of human history in numerous small model figures that implacably
track across the ash-covered walls of the gallery. The work’s miniaturisation
of form reminds one that the ‘pageant’ of history enacts itself in both grand
events and quotidian moments. He was invited to reinstall the work in the
contemporary galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, for a year.
The loan was later extended by another year.
Following on from Procession, in 2011 he won the tender
for a major commission for the new offices of PricewaterhouseCoopers designed
by Norman Foster in More London. De Menezes created a giant world map in tiny
figures on the PwC walls.
Describing his
broad concerns De Menezes states on his website (http://www.clintondemenezes.com/home.html) that he is “interested in the processes of
regeneration and degeneration as conceptual and physical forces that affect
space.” He also notes a “contemporary preoccupation with apocalypse in popular
culture, individual and collective identity” with his work providing him a
field for seeking resolution in a world in crisis.”
De Menezes’ most
recent ongoing production Erasure Series
consists of landscape photographs taken by the artist over the last 20 years
that were gradually erased with steel wool and turpentine. The resulting
images, where the erasure reads as some sublime light in the landscape, is
reminiscent of Northern Romantic landscape painting. In the light of his death
they almost seem prescient and point to a transcendent spirit that reigns
throughout his work.
Many remember De
Menezes as a gentle man with great generosity of spirit and an ebullient
response to life. Rarely provoked to anger De Menezes was unabashedly a
Romantic whose vision of the world was manifest early in his work in the image
of the hero with the broken sword.
His imaginative identification with such
figures played itself out in his life where his last act was in the giving of
his life to defend and protect his family against intruders invading the home
of his friends where they were staying. He had returned to South Africa to
celebrate his first wedding anniversary.'
Long may we
celebrate his endeavour.
De Menezes leaves
behind his wife, Nicola Saward, and daughter Eva.
A memorial for
Clinton will be held at Durban University of Technology, on Thursday January 9,
2014, at 10h00 – Virginia MacKenny
(Virginia MacKenny
is a practising artist and Associate Professor in Painting at the Michaelis School
of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town, South Africa)
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