Vela Projects is proud to present works by five Cape Town-based artists for the second edition of RMB Latitudes Art Fair.
This exhibition marks the first time that ALEXIS SCHOFIELD is exhibiting with the gallery. While the painter has become known for his scenes that explore alienation and ennui, these three compositions mark an exciting departure for his work. Rather than translating a photograph directly to canvas, Schofield has assumed a much more improvisational approach. “Painting is no longer a noun,” he says, “it’s a verb.” The resulting images are distorted to the point of abstraction; only upon closer inspection can we see recognisable forms coalesce, like an arm, a face or a high-heeled shoe. Making use of various techniques such as fluid blotches of pigment paired with delicate opaque strokes – the effect is dizzying, an anxiety-ridden fever dream of half-remembered images.
Off the back of his latest solo exhibition, Kash Out, BOYTCHIE continues to assess themes of greed and the desperation it engenders in two works that are, to date, the largest in scale he has accomplished. Finders Keepers shows two figures wrestling over a bag of gold. We cannot see their faces, but we are struck by their shadows, black angular strokes that carve up the painting, and their hands, corpse-like fists rendered in sinewy pinks and purples. Similar hands can be seen in Long Fingers, which sees three of them lusting villainously over rectangular golden blocks. The influence of German expressionism, especially painters like Max Beckmann and Ludwig Meidner, can be seen in the jagged outlines and jarring colours that attest to the binds in which capitalism embroils us.
Also exhibiting for the first time with the gallery is ceramicist DOMINIC PRETORIUS. Following his debut solo, A Room Full of Urns, the artist continues to be fascinated by the funerary urn as a simultaneously functional, aesthetic and sacred object. The question that drives this body of work is: what do urns contain, symbolically speaking? The free-standing sculptures depict spirits bursting out of their vessels, while three lightboxes contain fragments of urns that seem to have been dug out of the earth, “an archeology of myth,” as the artists calls it. With titles that borrow lines from Dante’s Inferno, Pretorius bids us to remember the people we’ve lost – both on a personal level and on a world-historical scale – and consider how they might live on in the underworld of our memories.
Dovetailing from her recent solo exhibition, Black and White Paradise, KHANYI MAWHAYI presents two works called Paths to Paradise I and II. Both make use of black and white lines of woolen thread paired with confident strokes of oil stick on matte black backgrounds. Looking at them is akin to looking at maps, like aerial shots of highways. Are these curves, curls and clover leaf-like patterns paths to paradise? If so, perhaps the woolen threads are lines of longitude and latitude, orienting us as we embark on the journey’s subtle twists and turns. The subdued palette fosters an effect of abstraction, suggesting that paths to paradise are ultimately nameless; they are more like paths in the Taoist sense, surrendering symbolically to the way of life rather than charting a definitive course.
NOZUKO MADOKWE, who is known for her paintings that make use of foraged natural earth pigments, shares a work
called Life and the Sensible. In this case, the word sensible is returned to its original meaning, capable of sensation rather than having good judgment. As for life, Madokwe refers to the journey of time as it is understood by animals and plants, mountains and seas. As humans, we often cannot perceive life on this geological time scale, and so assume it to be inanimate. Madokwe’s painting subverts this perception with sputters of pigment, swathes of coffee grain and sgraffito-like marks in the canvas. All of these techniques aim to apprehend the emotions of the earth from whence the materials came, resulting in a landscape that is evocative rather than literal.
Finally, two paintings by SONGEZO ZANTSI deal with social scenes photographed by the artist in Cape Town and translated onto canvas in oil paints. Inspired by Impressionist and Realist painters such as Courbet, Manet, Sickert and Degas, Zantsi aims to reflect, without judgement, the social realities that construct life in the city. His paintings document everyday realities and build a visual archive – measured through the artist’s unique style – of contemporary life in South Africa. Whereas previous bodies of work were based on archival images, these paintings reference images photographed by the artist himself, reflecting a new introduction to the artist’s practice. What remains consistent is Zantsi’s grappling with the social and cultural realities of life in South Africa. His eye is compassionate and looks over the urban landscape, drawing out images that reflect the quiet and sober moments amongst the busy forces of city life.
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