4 minute read
A MEDITATION ON ART AS LIFE
from FlyNamibia May 2024
Francois de Necker (1944-2024)
When Francois de Necker passed away recently he returned to his source, for death is nothing but the origin of life, as life is the compensation of death. His inventive brilliance flowed from his creative imagination, which had no beginning and no end. Francois challenged and changed the aesthetics and epistemology of earlier romanticised and realistic landscape art in this country. Over time, he developed a style and iconography that were his own, drawing from a diversity of sources that included the cosmology of the Bushmen/San, the spirituality of Africa and tenets of abstract expressionism, notably the juxtaposition of brightly coloured forms and symbols. This deployment of form and colour was calculated to evoke a sense of harmony and to represent outer and inner spaces.
Many of Francois de Necker’s paintings are meditations on life and celestial time. His last works, done shortly before his death, are delicately impressive, for the artist managed to compress the range and beauty of his art into small canvases. These speak to his boundless imagination and are deeply moving and radiant, laden with symbolic import.
Born in Vrede, South Africa, Francois attended art schools in Johannesburg that were modelled on the “academy” as it had emerged in European cities in the early modern period. From his initial encounter with the former South West Africa, now Namibia, in 1970 as an art teacher, his return to South Africa to lecture on art at the University of Pretoria, and his subsequent return to Namibia in 1981, he actively contributed his finely honed technical skills and passion for teaching to build local art education and art communities, offering art workshops, lecturing at the University of Namibia (UNAM) and networking with artists in this country and beyond. His works included paintings in oil, watercolour, acrylics, graphics, murals of discarded wood and metal pieces, as well as free-standing sculptures of metal and wood.
The freedom of his will to paint “landscapes of the mind” made Francois a visionary, sensitive outsider. Francois got the foundations of his art right from the careful selection of paper to the rendering of space and values, and often painted on the floor of his studio so as to have an allround perspective. Artmaking was both determinate and determined. The act of painting mattered. It was the artist’s response to the art of living.
One of the foundations of his art was the way in which he used colour. While the subject of many of his works was landscape, his paintings were really about colours, moods, space, symbols, values and textures of silence suggested by the landscape. His last exhibition, at the Project Room in late October 2021, was appropriately titled Recollections in Colour. In his later works, the artist increasingly abandoned recognisable imagery, consequently the paintings owe their expressive force to the juxtaposition of different primary and secondary colours: yellow, purple, red, orange, green and blue. He had a unique command of colour. His works abound with radiant colour harmonies and shapes that make for a sensitive balance between visuality and textuality.
The artist was prodigiously productive and left a versatile and inventive body of work in public and private collections in this country and beyond. What remains is enough to demonstrate the true genius of Francois de Necker, who lived to paint.
Alida, his widow, was his constant inspiration, best friend and critic.
Adieu Francois!
André du Pisani
