For many years I made a daily car journey from Newport to Tretower Court near Crickhowell, and in all that time I don't think that I once passed through the village of Llanover without slowing to a snail's pace, drawn by the darkly mysterious painting of a Mari Lwyd above the Post Office door. I'd never seen a Mari Lwyd other than in that painted sign, but my father had, and late in life he recounted his childhood terror of the sheeted horror which had come at him out of the night. The memory had stuck, ambushing him at moments of vulnerability. All his life his family were aghast at the power nightmares had to unseat his usual composure, but by the light of day he was a man who walked in the sunshine, laughed a lot, and was content.

He was eighty-four before he admitted to what had been bothering him, looked at it in my drawings, called it by its name, faced it down. As he lay dying in hospital, besieged by God knows what unseen monsters, he cried out and battled with his bed-sheets. He never liked to be confined by a sheet. Too much like the Mari, and too much like a shroud. With his passing the Mari Lwyd became central to my work, but quickly slipped the tether of its folk custom origins, metamorphosing into something less corporeal. It became, in the words of Picasso, 'A form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange hostile world and us: a way of seizing the power by giving form to our terrors, as well as our desires.' Clive Hicks-Jenkins February 2002

JULIAN MITCHELL March 2001 "Clive's latest works are a still-developing series of drawings and acrylics of this memory of his father, reinterpreted through his own experience. They are the most powerful images he has yet created. The sexy muscled young man, emerging more and more from the sheet as the series goes on, could be one of the dancers Clive directed. But the menacing horse's death-head he carries is a powerful metaphor for AIDS. He seems to be offering and taking away at the same time, an alluring invitation and a deadly threat. There is ancient as well as contemporary menace here, too - the severed horse's head as a sacrificial object from the iron age. The head is also a memento mori. Clive has started very late on his real life's work, and feels time's winged chariot is indeed at his back. Yet always Tretower sits in the background, a promise that heaven is obtainable, somehow, here on earth.

ROBERT MACDONALD, PLANET, February 2002 "One of the most powerful series of paintings and drawings produced in Wales in recent times.... There are not many artists in Wales, or in Britain as a whole for that matter, whose art deals in a serious way with big issues. I believe that Clive's painting does just that."

It's a curious experience, coming across the work of an artist that speaks directly to one: the shock, not of the new, but of the weirdly familiar. It is strange, hallucinatory, discombobulating, like meeting a doppelganger: as if one had in an absent-minded moment succeeded in putting the contents of one's own mind on paper or canvas or in bronze or marble and forgotten about it. Idly ambling into a gallery in Bath, I had exactly this experience with Clive Hicks-Jenkins' work.

On display were some examples of the Mari Lwyd sequence. The Deposition made me gasp. Where had I seen these images before? That horse? The man, tense, lean, muscled, with his great sculpted feet and massive calves? The winding sheet? The distant watchtower? Even the palette, a sort of grisaille undershot with pink and blue, the whole composition veined, not just the man or the horse, as if x-rayed? It is of course the stuff of dreams, but my own dreams - that transfigured man, suffering, perhaps dying, perhaps dead was me, but also Men; the rescuing horse - Pegasus, Bucephalus, but also Fuesli's nightmare - as bare, as sexual, as potent as the man, wrapped around in sheets belonging to the couch of lust as well as to the death bed, twisted in erotic ecstasy but equally in the throes of illness and death. Tristan's watchtower presaging never-absent and nameless threat.

As I came to know other of Hicks-Jenkins' works I found that the iconography there was from the inside of my own skull, too, from my soul's panorama: The Vision of Angels Ascending seeming to contrast angels red with Pentecostal flame and the brooding man, surrounded by animals close to gargoyles, the empty roofless house behind him, the dead man at his feet, empty arid valleys stretching behind. This is a page from my autobiography. The flaming beauty of the angels brings threat, the demand of a death before rebirth becomes possible. How did Hicks-Jenkins get inside my head?
Simon Callow
May 2005