Stevenson
08.02 - 20.03.2025

Inside Johannesburg’s Stevenson gallery hang Simphiwe Ndzube’s new paintings – collectively making up the solo exhibition ‘iNtwasahlobo’. The exhibition title is derived from isiXhosa, which is translated into ‘Spring’ in English. For Ndzube, Spring is tied to some of the central motifs in his works – the expressive use of colour, scenes of abundance, respite, and communing with nature in dreamlike pastoral settings. But not everything is as it seems. Each image holds something foreboding; every landscape is slightly off-kilter. 

It’s the characters and narratives of a place that are of interest to the Johannesburg-born, Los Angeles-based Ndzube. Rather than pursuing certainty or concerning himself with the construction of historically accurate worlds, the artist embraces mythology and, more recently, the magical-real as a way of creating the worlds in his work. 

‘iNtwasahlobo’ is the steady progression of these themes and approaches. Here, Ndzube taps into the African calendar, African cosmology and indigenous knowledge systems, and allows this to frame his engagement with Spring and all that it gives life to. It’s also a proposal to gently reframe or shift our understanding of time and land, through the narrative vehicle of magical-realist pastoralism. 

Much of this is achieved through Ndzube’s style of painting and his approach to composition. There is a disarmingly simple and sincere quality to each painting. The images are alive with colour, each canvas completed and then flecked with pinks, blues, reds, a constant drizzle in the colour scheme of speckled eggs. Then, as one lingers or leans in a little closer, the depths of the image begin to rise and unsettle the surface. 

In Egadini, for example, a woman waters a patch of land. It’s a quaint scene, complete with a rainbow and a colourful landscape from which flowers and crops spring up and flourish. Behind this, though, is a four-legged creature – either a horse or a dog – with ghostly red eyes, and an ominous figure in a wide-brim hat stands in the doorway of a house, watching. Above this scene, it’s not the sun perched in the top left corner, but the moon hanging in a black sky. 

The title work is much the same – a woman stands in a field with plentiful crops, while a rainbow arches overhead. Only, the woman is perched precariously on one leg, the vegetation is alien, the rainbow appears improbably against a night sky and the same looming figure haunts the doorway again. 

Ndzube calls these paintings “magical-realist pastoral scenes,” and considering his interest in the illusive and generative space between realism and mythology, or the slightly surreal and uncanny, the images in ‘iNtwasahlobo’ are not too surprising. But it’s worth looking at his previous works, too. 

The exhibition text cites Ndzube’s 2024 exhibition at Stevenson’s Amsterdam gallery, ‘After Rain Songs’, as something of a precursor. Certainly, many of the motifs in ‘iNtwasahlobo’ are found there, too, and it was in ‘After Rain Songs’ where Ndzube spoke to the idea of the rainbow as an uneasy inheritance in a newly democratic nation, something that continues to hang over the country, haunting even the night skies. There is also the 2022 show with Nicodim Gallery, ‘Isithunywa so Moya’, where the artist spoke of his approach to artmaking as being a process of intuitive channelling, each artwork filled with lives and stories that are not his, but rather “willed to existence by forces beyond my control.” 

Stylistically, it is somewhere along the fine line between the magical-real and free-spirited surrealism that Ndzube takes as his point of departure for this project. The recognisable images and rituals are all there – the smoking of inqawe, a traditional pipe, the watering of crops, and the moon as a marker of time – but they are contradicted and unsettled by Ndzube’s other interventions. How reliable is a moon that shares the sky with a rainbow? How at ease or in control are the foregrounded matriarchs when they are relentlessly stalked by those anonymous male figures? It’s a quietly successful consideration of style and subject – the pedestrian lull of a false image, and the satisfaction of a sudden dip into the surreal. Each painting bristles with a brilliant speculative tension. 

Then there is Untitled (Creation 4), not quite an anomaly, but perhaps a hint at what comes after the magical, the surreal. Abstract swathes of colour jostle inside the vertical canvas, topped with an enamel basin spilling out paint, beads, a calcified and unlit bundle of imphepho. Here and there, bursting through the linen canvas and reminiscent of Christo Coetzee’s bruised and beaten canvases, are found objects that look like bottle caps or bits of plastic piping. The effect is subtle, but strong. Each object creates a small, but unmistakeable disruption in the image, a refusal of neat interpretation. According to the chatter in the gallery, “He was supposed to go full abstraction with this show, but he got cold feet.” If that’s true, it’s probably for the best. The lean into abstraction in Untitled (Creation 4) is a brilliant moment in the show, but the magical-real pastoral scenes are an altogether rich exploration, and one worth sticking with for a while longer. 

Of all the work in ‘iNtwasahlobo’, it’s Untitled (chorus) that steals the show. The painting is large and has thankfully been given a wall of its own where, with its chorus of sleeping,  singing men, it sounds out like a symphony of colour and form. 

Tucked away in the background, against a bright blue sky, a cluster of vacant houses rests below the low arc of a rainbow. And here, hidden in plain sight at the bottom right-hand corner of the canvas, are those familiar, wide-brim hats. Those silhouetted men, always standing in doorways or in the lee of a building, are suddenly right here, lying prone and somewhat abject in the landscape, before slipping away into the surreal.