Lemkus Gallery
04.09 - 03.10.2025

In ‘Spes Bona’, Kamva Matuis stages a debut that feels like an urgent convocation. He summons history, myth, ritual, and memory into the gallery space, creating what might be described as a painted dialogue,  a reckoning with the present through the past.

The exhibition’s title, ‘Spes Bona’, recalls the Cape’s naming history: first called ‘Cabo Tormentoso’ (Cape of Storms) by the Portuguese, it was later renamed the Cape of Good Hope by European seafarers in the 15th century to signal the optimism tied to its role as a vital trade route to the East. This highlights the colonial archive of the Cape, where the promise of hope was tied to mercantile violence and the dispossession and dehumanization of the enslaved. The term also became tied to religious and symbolic hope: in European imagination, the Cape was a site of providence, of God-given opportunity. But in reality, it was a site of the beginnings of apartheid-like racial order, thus becoming a false hope.

In one room, the work Chosi – a tethering post with cow horns found in many Xhosa homelands where ancestral communication takes place, hangs beside a view of Table Mountain. I find this interesting as it anchors the show in the artist’s relationship to land, by situating the ritual object in direct dialogue with the mountain, the work anchors his practice in both ancestral memory and geographical identity. Here, Matuis opens up a conversation about return and belonging.   

In ‘Spes Bona’, limbs, torsos and faces are scattered across the surface-they kneel, strain, and avert the gaze, charged with something beyond themselves. Around them, objects float: a Mendi bell, goats, teacups, fruit, lit candles, skopo (sheep head). The paintings read like an altar and yet also resist being pinned down to any singular liturgy. The viewer stands inside a space of rite and ritual, one that feels both recognisable and estranging.

Matuis paints with history at his back. He’s drawing from art history, literature and social history. Apparitions of Dumile Feni and Steve Biko hover in works such as Zwelidumile and Bantu, appearing as spectral presences. He situates himself in a lineage of South African artists and theorists who use figuration as a site of witness and resistance, painting alongside and in conversation with those who insisted that art and politics cannot be separated.

On the other hand, a painting of the Rhodes statue, Jikijela, once a symbol of colonial dominance and later the flashpoint for the #RhodesMustFall movement, appears wrapped in plastic sheeting. Matuis renders Rhodes as an ambiguous relic, a figure suspended between the ruin of colonial power and its lingering afterlives in the present. Former flags of the Bantustans (Ciskei, Transkei) are painted, recalling apartheid’s policy of separate development, in which pseudo-states were created to strip Black South Africans of citizenship and confine them to ethnic homelands. Thus highlighting symbols of state manipulation – exile disguised as hope. Reminding us that South Africa was always built on contested ground.

Matuis’ lexicon is as precise as it is expansive.  In Ndiyakuzuza ngomso lini? pink mink blankets, often given as ceremonial gifts and reminders of home, floral and familiar, recur like a stubborn memory. An emblem of a certain South African domesticity, the work brings forth ideas of comfort, yet also brings to mind memories of dispossession. Through the use of old furniture and brassware (hand-me-downs from the farm owner’s home), they signal the unequal relations of ownership and inheritance. These domestic objects link to farm labour and intoxication primarily through the dop system. On farms, workers were often paid partly in alcohol, a practice that reinforced exploitation and control. The objects thus become traces of labour, of bodies tied to land they did not own. A globe recurs as a symbolic counterpoint, prompting reflection on access and exclusion in relation to broader questions of possession and land: who claims space, and who is denied it.

To give up a ghost and Wakrazulwa depict cow lungs, a shovel, and ceremonial blankets, which are all painted with forensic intensity. I view them as records of ritual, of the cycles of life, death and grief. These small elements become mnemonic debris: fragments that, once assembled, form a very beautiful language of Black survival.

A key sequence of works titled  Xolani(Failure to bare witness), isolates the eye. They produce a gauntlet of confrontational, intense gazes. Bloodshot, tired, glossy, dilated-these are not romanticised windows to the soul, but diagnostic registers of exhaustion. It feels as if Matuis reclaims the eye as a site of endurance and witness. There is something deeply unsettling in these ocular studies. To look into them is to be looked at, but also to sense the violence of being perpetually looked through.

Curated by Jared Leite, ‘Spes Bona’ is arranged as a journey, following a framework of hauntology, where past and present blur. To stage this exhibition in Cape Town, just streets away from monuments, statues, and architecture still marked by colonial economies, sharpens the irony of ‘Spes Bona’, that it, interestingly, offers little hope at all. ‘Spes Bona’ dismantles the false “good hope” of colonial ideology. But within that dismantling, Matuis plants a different kind of hope- small, fragile, resistant. 

His work detonates and heals in the same gesture, paving the way for a shifting perception. It is beautiful – objects, body, memory, blackness collapsing into one overwhelming truth: painting is still alive, and in the hands of Kamva Matuis, it is life-changing.