What does it mean to be a painter working in a global tradition in a country with a developed, if uneven, output of painting? The short answer: scary. Doubt and awe are your best friends. Awe because, as painter Jeanne Hoffman put it to me during a studio visit, it is now possible to live by selling paintings; you don’t need a side hustle to pay the rent. As for the doubt, Mia Chaplin summarised the existential fear confronting all painters by way of an aside. “I wonder how long painting will last. Do you think it will be forever? We are not going to get squashed by AI and NFTs?”
Who knows the future? Until it happens, let’s agree that painting endures. I recently spent time chatting with Chaplin and Hoffman, along with Maja Marx, who is also from Cape Town. I am intrigued by the magnificence of what they do as individuals: paint, brilliantly. Majesty is a compelling reason to hit the socials, but I had a journalistic motive for reaching out. I am interested in what – if anything – connects these three painters. And also how their paintings, which have in recent months been seen in Cape Town, Franschhoek, London, Turin and Wassenaar in South Holland, broaden our understanding of the re-emergence of painting circa now.
Re-emergence? After years of critical neglect and market disinterest, painting is back. Decisively. The remarkable careers of Zander Blom, Georgina Gratrix, Thenjiwe Nkosi, Simphiwe Ndzube, Cinga Samson and Brett Seiler, among others, offer a sense of contemporary painting’s limitless expression and vitalities as a vanguard medium. You have to go back to the forlorn 1980s to get a sense of painting as this alive and of the moment, perhaps in advance of it too.
Penny Siopis, Cake, circa 1984. Courtesy of Strauss & Co.
In the early 1980s, Penny Siopis produced a series of paintings depicting cakes and confections displayed in unusual perspectives on tables, often with lace settings. The material sensuality and excess of these “cake paintings” recalled the surface dramas of works by Christo Coetzee and Irma Stern, but, more profoundly, laid the groundwork for the post-feminist gunk figuration of Chaplin and Gratrix. And still, the innovations continued. Notable among them remains David Koloane and Bill Ainslie’s Thupelo artist workshops (1985–91), which provided painters like Pat Mautloa and Sam Nhlengethwa with a newfound agency and release from the bondage of realism.
The realities of late-apartheid life were the subject of paintings by Robert Hodgins and his work colleague Paul Stopforth. In 1986, Hodgins, a failed 1960s painter recently retired from teaching at Wits University, kicked off his extraordinary second act with a survey exhibition in Grahamstown. “By next year this time I’ll be the most famous (more likely the most detested) painter in South Africa,” Hodgins wrote painter Mark Hipper in February 1986. “But, of course, only in SA. Fortunately, not important, for I still love the making, almost erotically, certainly physically, definitely mentally.”
Marlene Dumas, Emily, 1985. Courtesy of the artist.
That phrase, “only in SA,” continues to ring true. When painterly ambition grips, artists leave. Departures are central to the biographies of Ernest Mancoba and Gerard Sekoto, as well as Lisa Brice and Marlene Dumas. In 1983, Amsterdam-based Dumas pivoted from assemblage and installation to painting. Some of the liquefied portraits she created, among them The White Disease (1985) and Emily (1984), were later shown in her charged solo, The Question of Human Pink, at Kunsthalle Bern, a storied Swiss museum now directed by Kabelo Malatsie. The legacy of this exhibition remains important for white painters engaged (consciously or not) with race and their South African birthright.
“I don’t know much about colour really,” wrote Dumas in the catalogue for her Bern exhibition. “I use it intuitively. I don’t know much about racism really/ my knowledge is skin deep.” Of the trio of Chaplin, Hoffman and Marx, only Chaplin is explicitly concerned with the human figure – a potent subject “charged with the frisson of deferred violence and eroticism,” as Ivor Powell wrote of Dumas in 2005. Sometimes this violence can be explicit and destabilising, as the 2017 controversy surrounding Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket (2016), which depicts the murdered teen Emmett Till, reminds.
Painting is a material act, but when it involves marshalling pigments to form a human figure, it unavoidably broaches questions of power and permission. “It is something I think about a lot,” says Chaplin. “I’ve always been overly aware that my paintings are of all these white people. I am South African. Why am I creating a gallery space where, when people walk in, it is just a bunch of white bodies?” She has recently expanded her repertoire of figures to include black subjects, but remains cautious. “I think the best thing I can do is be true to myself and also be sensitive, aware and open to new conversations about it.”
Mia Chaplin, Embrace, 2018. Courtesy of WHATIFTHEWORLD.
This assuredness is hard won. A graduate of Michaelis School of Fine Art, Chaplin spent much of the 2010s toggling between painting flowers and white figures, some clothed, others not. Her painterly style was a mash up of post-impressionism and School of London figuration. As her technical proficiency increased, so too did her ambitions. A 2018 work, Embrace, shows two naked white women breastfeeding. It featured in her solo Mouth, which inaugurated Chaplin’s current style of thick impasto painting and all-over entanglement of bodies and marks.
Embrace was painted in Paris during a 2018 artist residency. It was partly inspired by an encounter with the gestural work of Joan Mitchell in Musée de l’Orangerie. Process as much as technique is important to how Chaplin arrives at a finished work. Typically, she begins by scavenging images online and digitally collaging useful elements together to form a reference image. Recently, Chaplin commissioned photos of a mixed-race dance troupe to use as a reference instead. “The reference is very important because it is how the foundation is laid out.”
Chaplin’s initial marks are architectonic. “I like strong lines – they are like cables tying everything together and creating tension.” Colour enriches the basic schema, complicating as much as enriching it. “I only use about six colours: titanium white, ultramarine, sap green, burnt sienna, alizarin crimson, Indian yellow and cadmium yellow.” These colours are mixed and loosely applied, at first. “That’s the favourite part of the painting, and I don’t want to do any more – but I have to. I’ll slowly pull it tighter, sometimes too tight. It is hard to not get too obsessed with a reference image and forget that you’re actually making a painting.”
Jeanne Hoffman’s paper collages serve as references for her paintings, Milnerton studio, 2023. Photo by Sean O’Toole.
References are also important to Hoffman and Marx. Hoffman’s energetic paintings loosely reference her paper collages and ceramic pieces. “The references are a point of departure,” she says, “and then you have the problem, which you have to resolve in painting. The paintings become collages of collages.” Marx also uses references – folds of cloth and paper, the corrugations of cardboard, handwritten letters, notebooks – but camouflages them with her fastidious marks. She characterises the hyper-activated surfaces of her paintings as a scrim. “I don’t offer the eye a purchase in my paintings.”
Both Hoffman and Marx came to painting via sculpture-focussed MFAs. Hoffman attributes her creative restlessness (she is also an accomplished ceramicist) to her training in lithography and sculpture at Stellenbosch University. It inculcated a respect for drawing that formed the basis of her 2007 debut solo. Painting came later. Marx, the oldest of the three artists, completed her MFA at Wits University in 2008. A job cataloguing paintings by Stern and Alexis Preller for a private collector prompted her to look closely at painting. Marx marvelled at the immediacy of Preller’s mark making.
Maja Marx, Hiatus (detail), 2023. Courtesy of WHATIFTHEWORLD.
“I am very interested in that up-close moment in painting, the small little performances that build up,” says Marx. These bravura moments, she adds, distil the real drives and ambitions of a painter. Marx, like Chaplin, paints slowly and deliberately. A composition can take up to a month to finish. Earlier this year, Marx was a guest at the Ekard Residency in southern Holland. She completed three extraordinary paintings, Lucida I-III (2023), in a month. Intrigued by the phenomenology of light in her residency studio, Marx fashioned a camera lucida and, working in near darkness, conjured in delicate marks the superabundance of late-baroque Dutch and Flemish still-life painting – notably Rachel Ruysch and Jan Davisdzoon de Heem – in vivid hues of yellow oils.
Unlike Marx and Chaplin, Hoffman works with acrylics. “I am too impatient for oil,” says the artist, whose core colours are titanium white, raw umber, burnt green earth, terracotta and Chinese orange. “It doesn’t dry fast enough. I will make ten paintings on the same painting if I used oil.” Her compositions enact this impatience: they are a precarious accumulation of tendril-like lines and clustered mosaics of colour activated by feral brush marks. The outcome is mysterious, energetic and thrilling. “There is always a sense of balancing a mirror on the edge of a staircase.”
Jeanne Hoffman, A Stage | A Diagram of Moves (diptych), 2022. Courtesy of Everard Read.
The schematic nature of some of Hoffman’s compositions can make them seem incomplete. “I know when a painting is done,” she says. “There has to be a tension between completion and incompletion.” Finishing has become increasingly difficult for Chaplin. “I want the figures to melt into one another, for the bodies to be broken up a bit, for the whole surface to be active and moving,” she says. A recent painting, Learning to Breathe Underwater (2022–23), a triptych depicting a group of naked white figures in an Arcadian setting, distils these ambitions. Its completion was characterised by panic.
In February, shortly before Learning to Breathe Underwater went on public view at the Cape Town Art Fair, Chaplin rushed down to the conference centre to apply more colour. The intervention yielded a result: the painting was acquired by the Rupert Art Museum. Learning to Breathe Underwater now forms a family collection that includes Penny Siopis’ opulent banquet painting Still Life with Watermelons and Other Things from 1985. It is a fitting company for a painter whose recent work, along with that of Hoffman and Marx, revives the miracle of painting, a medium long thought dead, or at least refuted.
Mia Chaplin in her Wale Street studio showing a reference image for Embrace, Cape Town, 2023. Photo by Sean O’Toole.
