Investec Cape Town Art Fair
18.02 - 20.02.2022
Six artists will be exhibiting new bodies of work in the SOLO section at this year’s Investec Cape Town Art Fair. Here’s a preview of what to expect.
Osvaldo Ferreira
Osvaldo Ferreira, O Caos Global, 2022. Courtesy of This Is Not a White Cube.
Osvaldo Ferreira takes the city of Luanda as inspiration for his figurative paintings. One might call them city symphonies: they present a many-noted, oftentimes kaleidoscopic sense of modern life in Angola. His compositions are arranged associatively, almost rhythmically, around a combination of exuberant palettes, textile traditions, and social life. These patterns, in many ways, reflect social life: they straddle the ordinary and the opulent; they are inherited and remade anew. “There is in it a balance between tradition and contemporaneity,” says Ferreira, “there is in it the mark of a legacy and simultaneously the search for a renewal of languages.” The sometimes stitched-together look of his paintings is due to the spontaneity of images, relationships and attitudes as they present themselves in public. In his most recent work, Ferreira counterbalances the spontaneity of the street with the introspection of private life, in particular the private lives of women. In this case, the bright palette and layered patterns refer to a complex interiority.
Luyanda Zindela
Luyanda Zindela, I have to be serious, 2022. Courtesy of SMAC Gallery.
“What is human resides in the ordinary,” says Luyanda Zindela. His talent, then, is to magnify what is ordinary, to take small moments – a glance, a snippet of conversation – and turn them into large-scale, meticulously cross hatched portraits of friends and family. His hand is precise – Zindela calls it “clinical” – rendering subtle variations of his subjects in exquisite detail. Since this is a technically intensive and time-consuming process, Zindela’s practice, though it refers to intimate connections, requires long stretches of solitude in his home studio. These portraits, then, come to reflect more so an aspect of himself than the subject they depict. Take I need to be serious (2022) for instance. It is based off of a video of Zindela’s nephew. In it, he is trying to pose. “I need to be serious,” he says, composing himself, but each time he looks at the camera, he bursts into laughter. After hours of meditation on this moment – I need to be serious – the mantra has come to refer to Zindela’s relationship to art making – or art career making – in general. Experimenting with paint for the first time in these works, Zindela is also making room for experiment and play.
Johannes Phokela
Johannes Phokela, Original Sin – Fall of the Damned as Damaged, 1993. Courtesy of Eclectica Contemporary.
A self-identified empiricist, Johannes Phokela’s paintings might be thought of as investigations. Utilising a swathe of classical painting references that are “too broad or more convoluted to even contemplate,” Phokela comments on the libidinal appetites that continue to underpin art and politics. Citing also “tabloid news” and the “scourge of social media” as a research base, he satirises those images – or rather, systems of image distribution – that provoke our consumption. The two paintings he has produced specifically for ICTAF – Error of Parallax and Going Solo 2 – see figures indulging in excess while the world falls unmanageably apart around them. Reading these works in the shadow of the climate crisis and a worldwide pandemic, they beg us to take responsibility for our extractive tendencies and the delusions we turn to in times of crisis.
Thebe Phetogo
Thebe Phetogo, blackbody Composite (In Protest), 2020. Courtesy of Guns & Rain.
Thebe Phetogo’s presentation of paintings is grounded in acts of speculation. In the face of an art market that increasingly views the black figure with regards to financial speculation, Phetogo’s project aims to recuperate speculation as the “generative approach to figuration.” His figures – each representing their own origin story – are, thus, depicted in various states of flux. One fashions masks out of mud; another, covered in mud, picks out of it with its tongue. These sometimes horrific elements “are a tacit acknowledgement of history both real-world and art historical.” The chroma key green backgrounds – Phetogo’s signature – recall the green screen as that which has yet to be imagined – or simulated. “With regards to my own work,” he says, “the green screen could be seen as the knife’s edge.” On the one hand, the green surface – and, we might argue, the painting as a whole – represents the imagination which rests at the cusp of completion. On the other, it is trapped in the liminal space of creation, withheld from any one finality.
DuduBloom More
DuduBloom More, Girl, Get Up, 2021. Courtesy of Berman Contemporary.
Duduzile (DuduBloom) More uses cardboard, wool and thread to create sculptural bundles of disks. “I have always been drawn to the circle. It is known as calming, feminine, safe, enclosing, equal. It reminds me of a beginning and an end. When the circles are in a bundle, I also get the feeling of a togetherness, of people, energies, or experiences.” Pleasure is important to her process; the pieces are soft, comforting to handle, and pleasing to the eye. More describes her practice as “cathartic.” It is a nurturing engagement with material which provides some relief from our “apocalyptic world” where “everything is fast, disconnected (from nature), regurgitated, capitalist.” Resembling, to varying degrees, bouquets of flowers, molecules, lichens, cells, clouds, this works call our attention to slower, more organic processes of accumulation – and the beauty therein.
Brett Charles Seiler
Brett Charles Seiler, Wet Carpet, 2021. Courtesy of Everard Read.
Brett Seiler’s most recent work can be said to represent a sort of home-building. For one thing, they are painted using home remodelling materials like bitumen and roof paint, culminating in a decidedly DIY aesthetic. They are also concerned with interiors: parquet floors and houseplants define each frame, and the figures within can be seen in various stages of domesticity, ranging from the mundane (lounging) to the blissful (kissing) to the disastrous (flooding). Couples with portraits based on photos of lovers and friends, they represent, too, the act of home-making with one’s chosen family, in all its glory and complication.
