The Dark Knight: Exhibition of unique creative pieces

He’s an artiste with a burning passion for all things dark. Darkness fascinates him and inspires him to create art that is one-of-a-kind. Clyde D’Mello is a young artist with myriad ideas in his mind, which he expresses through his artworks.

His current works are being displayed as part of an exhibition called Man &The Skull. “This was a poem I wrote in 2008 when doing my bachelor’s degree in Chitrakala Parishath. I tried to venture into photography and post-modern art, but it wasn’t meant for me. At that point, I wanted to perform my poem in front of people in an open space. I was thinking of a playful version of a man and a skeleton having a conversation through gestures,” explains Clyde.

Clyde confesses that he was a bit of a lost soul when it came to finding a ground in the field of art. “After being lost for a year, I ended up doing my masters in art history from Shanthinekitan.”

Post that, Clyde started doodling and drawing and used his doodles in a deeper context. “I decided to translate the poem into a visual narrative and started working on a graphic narrative in a comic book format. There is a lot to learn from this world, especially from the dead. My current works portray a conversation of ‘death’. Hope this is a haunting reminder of the past and a glorious future,” shares Clyde.

What changed the way Clyde looked at art was when he found out that his grandfather was a coffin maker. “My mom told me that my works reminded her of him. So, I tried to find my roots which helped me channelise my art. I started collecting the things that my grandpa had,” he says.

While many people asked Clyde to make beautiful sceneries instead of dark art, he persevered and stuck on to his ideas. “I like the dark — it gives me a feeling of thrill. Being a Roman Catholic, I studied the history of the church which also had a lot of darkness in it. I started reading Edgar Allan Poe and other authors who had written about darkness,” says the eccentric art maker, who looks upto Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Francisco de Goya and Edvard Munch.

After his tryst with darkness, what can we expect from him in the future? “I’m now doing my research on time. We have an old West Germany clock at home and for some reason I like the ticking of the clock. So now, I’m working with the parameters of time,” says Clyde. To get a glimpse of Man &The Skull, head to Alliance Francaise, where the exhibition is on till August 26.