Chapter 10 - The Poetics of Paint

MOSHEKWA LANGA Goldie 2005
Acrylic and Conte wax crayon on paper
64.5 x 50 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town
Photographer: Mario Todeschini
© Moshekwa Langa

On March 13, 2008, the Joburg Art Fair opened its doors at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg, the first time an art fair had ever been held on the African continent. New York’s Jack Shainman and Perry Rubinstein galleries were among the twenty-two local and international galleries exhibiting. By the time the Art Fair closed, three days later, 6,500 people had passed through the doors, and public and gallerists alike appeared to be pleased with the event.

Among the installations, sculptures, videos, performances, and mixed media works, there were many paintings, always popular with collectors. A highlight of the Art Fair was an adjunct exhibition curated by gallerist Michael Stevenson entitled Take your road and travel along: The advent of the modern black painter in Africa. The title of the show is a quote from a poem by Gerard Sekoto, who wrote about the extreme difficulties that artists like himself faced in trying to realize their ambitions to become professional artists in their home countries, as well as the loneliness they faced when moving abroad to make a new life.

Writes Stevenson in the catalogue for the show, “The assimilation of the European painting tradition into an African idiom resulted in a rich genre of work that is rarely researched and exhibited, even though it challenges and undermines many of the prevailing assumptions about modernism, modernity, and the conception of the modern artist.”

When Picasso drew upon the imagery of the African masks and fetishes he saw in ethnographic museums and found in the flea markets of Paris to make such groundbreaking paintings as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), his departure from the classical figurative tradition was considered radical and daring, but, conversely, the influence of Europe on African painters has too often led to a dismissal of their work as “inauthentic.”

Take your road and travel along presented a rare opportunity to view modernist painting from across Africa: fresh and lively landscapes, portraits, and scenes of urban and rural life not only by South African painters, Sekoto, George Pemba, and Ernest Mancoba, but also by their contemporaries such as Ben Enwonwu from Nigeria and Sam Ntiro from Tanzania. The Gerard Sekoto Self Portrait (1947), which had once appeared in the show Contemporary South African Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture at the Washington National Gallery (1949) and had sold at auction at Bonhams, London, in May 2006 for £117,600 ($235,000), setting an auction record for the artist at the time, sold again at the Joburg Art Fair from Stevenson’s show for a reputed R5,000,000 ($670,000).

When considering the current state of painting in South Africa, it is also necessary to reassess attitudes toward painters of the past, and this exhibition provided a rare opportunity.

Today painters, while respecting earlier generations, naturally do not consider it necessary to be bound by their artistic constraints. Says artist Penny Siopis in an interview with Sarah Nuttall in Art South Africa magazine (Summer 2005): “I think painting shouldn’t be seen as a rarefied activity, or as something triumphantly performed on a legendary canvas. It is better seen as a practice of invention involving many forms: painterly installations, parts of sculpture, performance, marks on the body.” Although Siopis has made significant video works, like My Lovely Day (1997), in which the artist used family home movie footage to examine the white immigrant experience in Africa, she is known primarily as a painter.

For Siopis and artists like Marlene Dumas, Lisa Brice, and Johannes Phokela, paint is not simply the medium that is used to achieve the final image. The surface the paint creates, its materiality, is held by the artists to be as important as the image itself. Says Dumas, “The meaning doesn’t reside in the source, but in what you do with it.”

Dumas’s 2008 retrospective at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg was entitled Intimate Relations, a title chosen by the artist to convey as much about her bodily relationship with the canvas and paper she uses as about the subjects of her work. Videos of Dumas at work show how intensely she throws herself into the action of painting, laying the paper for her watercolors on the floor, throwing the water onto it, and working over the paper on her hands and knees. Talking about her oils, the artist says that when she uses too much paint her paintings die and take too long to dry. Using turpentine to scrub down troublesome areas on the canvas, Dumas constantly restarts her process as the work progresses, painting in the moment rather than building up and refining an image.

Lisa Brice incorporates the very surface on which she paints into the meaning of the work, using stretched frames not of canvas but of blue denim to make her images of the heated sexual exchanges of young people. Rather than paint, Brice often uses bleach to remove the dye, working from dark to light on her midnight blue-hued images.

Phokela draws on the grandiose history of Western art to take on the great masters such as Breugel and Rubens. Dorothee Kreutzfeldt reaches out from making her own paintings in the studio to work on collaborative projects aimed at transforming public space.

A longtime resident of Johannesburg, David Koloane’s paintings are essentially an extended visual poem dedicated to the city, featuring a smoky backdrop of skyscrapers or township homes, glimmering through the agitated flurries and scrawls of Koloane’s nervy brushstrokes.

Like Koloane, Sam Nhlengethwa works at Johannesburg’s most famous studio, the downtown Bag Factory. Using images from old books, posters, and media, Nhlengethwa cuts, pastes, and paints in his striking recreations of the historical past, his tributes to jazz greats and his new paintings reflecting the art world.

Mustafa Maluka and Moshekwa Langa, who essentially came of artistic age after the ending of apartheid, work rather differently, though both work with the figurative. Using brilliant colors, Maluka creates compelling large-scale portraits of an international community of streetwise young people, often with the gaze fixed on the viewer, floating them against backgrounds of bright graphics. Langa, on the other hand, makes work that is intensely personal. His expressionistic paintings are diaristic, a long exploration and notation of the world.

Though most of the artists above work in other media as well, they choose to paint because painting is such an extraordinarily direct medium, offering an intimate experience with surface not available through photography or video.

PENNY SIOPIS
Feral Fables: Changeling 2007
Ink, glue on paper
76.5 x 56 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town
© Penny Siopis