Thirty-three year old Colombian artist Mateo López has been selected by South African artist William Kentridge (1956) as his protégé, as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. For a period of one year, these two artists will work side by side in creative collaborations.
Mateo López studied architecture at the Universidad Javeriana for a year. He then transferred to the Universidad de los Andes, where he completed an education in Fine Arts. Like Kentridge, López's work focuses on broadening the notion of drawing, its reach and the expansion of its limits through the marriage of the medium with narrative situations, trajectories, creation, and the representation of spaces.
William Kentridge is internationally known for autobiographical works that address the sociopolitical situation in South Africa after Apartheid. He has achieved international recognition for works that are always political and that possess a narrative intention rarely observed in contemporary art. Kentridge's continuous attempts to erase the boundaries between mediums is exemplified by the use of charcoal to draw, erase, and redraw until an animation emerges from the process; or by his works in which the final product becomes the deconstruction of a detailed image or carefully rendered drawing.
In 2002, Rolex launched this program aimed at the conservation of artistic patrimony and at encouraging individual excellence by sponsoring extraordinary emerging artists working in the fields of dance, literature, film, music, visual arts, and theatre.
The purpose of the Program is to bring exceptional artists together with great masters working in the same field. For a year of creative collaboration in a one-to-one mentoring relationship, mentors and protégés will share their experiences and collaborate in an artistic relationship created to generated professional growth and help them achieve their full potential. Each pair will reach consensus with regard to the most effective way of interacting. Some pairs may decide to develop a shared project, while others may choose to develop individual projects. In doing so, they will generate a chronogram to schedule the dates and places in which they will meet. This way, a mentor may travel to visit his protégé's studio or vice versa; or they may decide to work in one place for a long period of time.
Rolex offers each protégé a grant of USD 25,000.00 to develop his/her project during the mentoring year. When that period of a year ends, the protégé will then receive an additional USD 25,000.00 for the creation of a new work. Each mentor will receive USD 50,000.00 for his participation. Any traveling expenses incurred by either party—protégé or mentor—will also be covered.
Artists cannot participate in the competition unless they are selected by the event's international panel of experts. Eventually, three finalists are chosen by the panel to travel and meet the mentor, who is responsible for making the final decision and chooses who his/her protégé will be. For this edition of the event, López had to compete against Darinka Pop-Mitic (36, Serbia) and Colombian artist Milene Bonilla (36).
This year, the group of mentors includes Margaret Atwood (literature), Patrice Chéreau (theater), Gilberto Gil (music), Lin Hwai-min (dance), William Kentridge (visual arts), and Walter Murch (film). In the past, the initiative has included the participation of mentors in the visual arts like: David Hockney, Anish Kapoor, Rebecca Horn, and John Baldessari; and protégés like Alejandro Cesarco, Matthias Weischer, and Masanori Handa, among others.
Since the 2002 initiative, the event has seen the participation of 173 artists, art lead...