On the Structure(s) of Abstraction: Mongezi Ncaphayi’s ‘Standard of Language’

A review by Vusumzi Nkomo on the 4th of July 2023. This should take you 5 minutes to read.

“If you’re going to rescue Blackness from its place in the world, you have to rescue it from the language which places it in that world.”

– DS Marriott, In conversation with Frank Wilderson III¹

“Now, as always, aesthetics are a matter of life and death.”

– Rizvana Bradley, On Black Aesthesis²

Mongezi Ncaphayi, 2023. Courtesy of Cape Town Art Residency.

Art historian Joshua I. Cohen, in a recent essay titled Identity and Abstraction: Ernest Mancoba in London and Paris, 1938-1940, argues that the late South African artist Ernest Mancoba struggled against what Cohen curiously calls a “(slow) death” induced by the persistent violence of white South Africa, forcing him to “(self)-exile.”³ According to Cohen, “To stay alive—psychologically, creatively—the black South African sculptor and painter Ernest Mancoba (1904–2002) managed to leave home.”⁴ Meaning, to stay ‘home’ would be tantamount to corpsing himself, at psychological and creative levels. The assault on Mancoba’s cognitive capacities and psychic structure pushed him towards abstraction; his adoption of this modernist aesthetic mode is a response to (and push back against) an imposition by paternalistic white liberal patrons who demanded that he produce ‘sad’ images of natives who acquiesced to colonial domination. This perennial imposition seeks to deny Mancoba – and I aver, all Black people/artists – of the ability to produce ideas/concepts. (Though I do appreciate the value of reading and placing Mancoba within the larger art historical discourse of post World War II modernists in exile. His specific suffering seems to operate by a radically distinct, if not particular, paradigmatic logic; for example, he tells curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, “When I arrived in London, I remember that, out of solidarity, I had dressed up as a worker with a cap, but when I crossed certain poor areas, children stared and soon followed me through the streets, singing ‘Nigger, Nigger go to hell. English, English ring the bell!’”)⁵

I begin this way in order to situate South African artist Mongezi Ncaphayi within this tradition of abstraction in South Africa. I seek to consider, through his work, the implications and stakes of this decision, or what Cohen, in the text cited above, refers to as the “complications and difficulties involved in reconciling ‘black’ and [abstract] ‘art.’”⁶ This is a scandalous, if not structurally impossible, reconciliation, but one that must be attempted nonetheless, for it pushes ‘beyond’ what is conceptually and epistemologically possible within the domain of the representational aesthetic.⁷

Mongezi Ncaphayi, 2023. Courtesy of Cape Town Art Residency.

In his recent exhibition, Standard of Language, showing at the Cape Town Art Residency, Ncaphayi assembled a set of abstract compositions of brilliant shapes and forms, energetic marks, colours and strikingly sharp lines. The geometric shapes (circles and semicircles, squares, triangles, trapezoids) in primarily intense primaries (yellows, reds and blues) float against tumultuous acrylic ink backgrounds that border on the volcanic. They erupt and flood the canvases, meandering across the plane, leaving traces and stains. The surfaces are generally smooth textured except for sparse moments of concentrated blobs of thick paint that accentuate the pieces’ sense of space into what we can call the work’s space-volume. In a sea of cacophonic colours, Ncaphayi, through wet-on-wet, gently mixes the waves of ink on canvas, achieving these fantastic topographic surfaces of purples against greys, yellows and reds. Dense units of dots – in blues, purples, greens, and greys – are seen across the pieces, gathering force like ethereal creatures flocking together.

Abstraction allows Ncaphayi to organise space (and objects) as well as time (and movement) by way of what aesthetic philosopher Paul Crowther calls “the realm of transperceptual space,” through which we could organise “spatial items, relations, or states of affairs that are not accessible to perception under normal circumstances [including] unusual perceptual perspectives (such as aerial ones).”⁸ This strengthens Ncaphayi’s cartographic strategies. He maps his forms, punctuating them by strings of diagonal and dynamic lines.

Ncaphayi’s abstract procedure is marked by an essential and generative contradiction; it mobilises symbols (that we recognise within our system of signs or can access through perception) to move us towards or transport us (for lack of a better expression) to the frightening limits of Symbolisation, in the Lacanian sense, where language fails to represent ‘reality’. This is why I cannot agree with critic Ashraf Jamal’s conclusions that “No angst, no rage, permeates [Ncaphayi’s] paintings.”⁹ The opposite is true. His compositions scream. They thunder, bellowing. They are the abyssal site that, contra to the recognisable map-making strategies he relies on, signals the point where a subject loses temporal and spatial coordinates, which is, effectively, to lose subjecthood, stricto sensu. It is to lose the world, no less.¹⁰ Or, to be lost in the world, like Mancoba’s natal excommunication, that is, choosing between exile and (psychological and creative) death, which is no choice at all but a structural displacement. Perhaps Ncaphayi is not guiding us anywhere specific, his mapping notwithstanding; rather, he asks us to think about our very desire (and the structure of this desire) for a place. There is no where to go.