South African Art Now

VUYILE VOYIYA

Linocuts, with their sharply graphic delineations in black and white, have played an important role in the history of art making in South Africa, usually the first printmaking technique taught in the community art centers that provided basic art training to young black students. The technique is popular largely because lino is cheap, and transferring the image from the inked-up surface to paper can be done simply by rubbing the back of the paper with a spoon or a lightbulb.

In Cape Town, studying first at the Community Art Project in 1985 and moving on to the Michaelis School of Fine Art from 1986 to 1990, Vuyile Cameron Voyiya developed a very distinct and unique style in cutting lino. Eschewing the crisply cut line and crosshatching that is so characteristic of the medium, Voyiya constructed his sinuous curves with a series of small triangular cuts, allowing him to show the soft folds of fabric or the curves of face with a sensitivity unusual for the unforgiving medium.

Rhythm in 3/4 Time (1987) is a series of six linocuts in which a man who resembles the artist himself gazes in fear, caught in the headlights of some terrifying authority, shielding himself against attack. No background is portrayed, so the location remains unidentified. The figure is trapped in an impenetrable black space, suggesting a psychic as well as physical darkness.

As a black student at Michaelis, located in a white area, Voyiya himself was frequently stopped and questioned by the police when he went to work at the art school at night. Rhythm in 3/4 Time encapsulates the way every black man was liable to be regarded by the authorities as a potential criminal/political troublemaker during apartheid.

Voyiya’s powerful series caught the attention of international curators, and the prints appeared first on Art from Southern Africa at the Kulturhuset in Stockholm in 1988, then the Havana Biennale of 1991 and the Sydney Biennale of 1992.

Since then the artist has continued to work as a printmaker, showing work regularly on group and solo shows, and as filmmaker, collaborating with American art historian Julie McGee to make The Luggage Is Still Labeled: Blackness in South African Art in 2003, a widely discussed documentary in which artists, educators, gallerists, and critics were interviewed about the extent to which political transformation had—or had not—improved opportunities in the art world for black artists.

As a printmaker, Voyiya’s significant contribution has been to continually engage with a classic tradition of figurative European art, translating this tradition into a distinctly African vernacular with his technically sophisticated and visually arresting black and white linocut images.