Inga Somdyala’s sophomore solo show, following his breakout Adamah at Whatiftheworld last year, finds itself somewhere in the middle, in the act of measuring the distance between two points. The show came about in the space between Reservoir’s seventh floor gallery space on Bree Street, where the artist took up residence, and the sliver of ocean that is visible through the Foreshore. This raised point of view noticeably slants the work this time around. Where Adamah lay flat like a layer of dust, As far as the sea is suspended like a wire.
The shift in focus away from the groundedness of his debut towards the suspension that defines As far as the sea suits the artist’s sensibility. Somdyala’s greatest talent is his way with materials. The medium truly is the message, in the sense that the content of Somdyala’s work is often baked into the material that mediates between artist and audience. The swag of folded boat sculptures that greets the viewer in the lobby goes to show that even when Somdyala tries his hand at more representational forms, they represent a means of getting from point A to point B. I was pleasantly surprised to find the little origami boats scattered throughout the show. A dash of twee amidst the seriousness.
Inga Somdyala, Mare Nullius, 2023. Photo by Paris Brummer. Courtesy of Reservoir.
The interest in naval iconography also extends to the show’s centrepiece, Itinerario: Key To The East. Three sails made of umbhaco fabric, anchored by cotton sash cords and offset weights filled with atlantic sea salt, cut angular lines across the sea facing window. We are forced to look through them towards the glimmer of Table Bay, as the sloping rope and swooning material sweeps the viewer up like an onshore breeze. The red umbhaco also acts as a culturally specific marker here, and a point of departure for Somdyala.
Installation view: Inga Somdyala, As far as the sea, 2023. Photo by Paris Brummer. Courtesy of Reservoir.
One of the distances the artist is trying to retrace in As far as the sea is the well trodden path from the Eastern Cape to Cape Town, which Somdyala himself followed as an adolescent. In Righteous Path III, a photograph printed onto hanging canvas, he traces the route from Cofimvaba with a carpet of umbhaco, like a trailing imprint of Xhosa identity, or a prone monument to rural-urban migration. The path of red material weaves through the thicket towards an obscure destination ahead. It’s a striking image, although something about the dissonance between raw canvas and digital image stood out for me, if only because of the artist’s otherwise flawless sense for material coherence.
The suite of red oxide paintings shows off the exquisite ochre gradients for which Somdyala is becoming known. His ability to concentrate earthy pigments across a modest patch of canvas, which was already evident in his debut, is only scaled up here. Once again, the uncomplicated sensuousness of these paintings is something to marvel at. One can spend hours tracing the oxide pigment as it pools and dissipates across his surfaces. My eye was especially drawn there where the paint gathered and darkened into smouldering charcoal.
Each painting in this series is also split by a vein of thread sewn into the canvas. The individual titles suggest that these lines represent a stretch of highway along the route from east to west, like the Tradouw Pass, Prince Alfred’s Pass and the Huguenot Tunnel. The incorporation of a threaded contour line turns what might have seemed like a 1:1 sample of earth in the context of Adamah into a scale map of the South African interior, or the view from an aeroplane. The thread disrupts a granular view of the land in favour of a more cartographic perspective.
Inga Somdyala, Lingua Franca (left) and Huguenot Tunnel (right), 2023. Photo by Paris Brummer. Courtesy of Reservoir.
In one corner of the exhibition space, three copper wires span the length of the wall. I could not immediately tell if it was an artwork or an architectural feature, but the show notes title the installation As Far As The East From The West. Here, again, the artist is interested in spanning distances, but only “as far as.” We remain in the midst of an indefinite passage, taut like stretched copper, as Somdyala extends himself into the interminable middle of a career.
Lingua Franca, an installation of nine flag-like pieces in a darker brown hue, meets the viewer at the furthest end of the exhibition route. It incorporates the shape of the coastline, stitched in with red and blue thread, as a metaphor for a cultural threshold. Hybridity and alienation are the key themes that cut across Lingua Franca, but they remain unresolved. Instead, Somdyala hopes to “extend the […] Xhosa cultural custom of moving from mountain-initiation towards an ever receding body of water, arriving yet forced to go further; circling like seagulls above the Castle of Good Hope.”
With these words, the artist nails something about the movement through alienation, as well as the passage to and through Cape Town itself. Cape Town remains, in essence, a way station, or a moment in an artist’s career before they move on to something bigger. As it was once a whistle stop for European settlers and, before that, a seasonal dwelling for the Goringhaiqua, artists pass through here leaving all sorts of traces. As far as the sea is yet another of these passing impressions upon the peninsula. I trust that Inga Somdyala’s work will linger around these parts for a while still.
Inga Somdyala, Itinerario: Key To The East, 2023. Photo by Paris Brummer. Courtesy of Reservoir.
