Rainmaker

Vela Projects is proud to present Rainmaker, an exhibition that celebrates the legacy of the late South African abstract artist Samson Mnisi. Rainmaker marks the first occasion that Mnisi’s work has been presented in a solo exhibition since his death in 2022. 

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Mnisi was born in 1971 in Lesotho. His father, being Swati, considered his en caul birth (when a baby is born still inside the amniotic sac) a sign of a spiritual gift. Mnisi spent the majority of his childhood in Soweto, while occasionally he would visit his relatives in Mpumalanga, many of whom were sangomas, or traditional healers. This tension between the harsh reality of township life in the era of Apartheid and the more traditional, spiritually-inflected rhythms of the Swazi culture, one that followed Mnisi throughout his life and career.

As a young man, Mnisi served as a cadre in Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC, to protect his community in the White City section of Soweto. Later, however, disillusioned by internal fighting within the movement, he turned to a life of crime. “Violence makes violence,” Mnisi said about this time in his life, “If you grow up in the streets with violence, you become very violent.That’s the only way one could survive.”

In 1992, broke and frustrated, Mnisi enrolled in the academy run by the Federated Union of Black Artists (FUBA). FUBA was, notably, one of the few institutions in the Apartheid era where black students could get a quality arts education in addition to exposure to the Black Consciousness Movement. Under the tutelage of the likes of David Koloane and Kagiso Patrick Mautloa as well as Johannesburg Art Foundation’s Bill Ainslie, Mnisi became interested in an abstract expressionist language that found purchase in the politically tumultuous years between the State of Emergency declaration in 1985 and the first democratic elections in 1994. What separated Mnisi from his predecessors was the way in which he combined expressive painting techniques with the ritualistic practices inherited from the healers in his lineage.

While Mnisi experimented with a wide range of mediums, colours, and modes of expression over the years, the basic foundation of his practice remained the same. He began a painting by tapping into a meditative state and carefully, ritualistically, marking the composition with symbols that carried cultural and spiritual significance. “I dig inside me,” the artist said,“I find old pieces, ancient things, and then I bring them out to remind myself of who I was, who I have been, before I am what I am now.” There are triangles that relate to balance, crosses that symbolise good fortune in the face of crossroads, and parallel lines that represent smooth journeys.

This symbology formed the skeleton, the background layer, of Mnisi’s work, representing the metaphysical world: the spiritual, ancestral, and eternal. On top of this, Mnisi added his propensity towards expressive, improvisational mark-making: splashes of colour; big, bold, intuitive gestures. This style reflected Mnisi’s emotional world: childhood trauma, political frustration, the agony of the present. The overall effect is characterised by a synergy of dichotomies: the eternal and the present, the ritualistic and the expressive, the metaphysical and the material. As Mnisi put it, “Art is for pain, pleasure, love and hate, sorrow and happiness. It is the spirit of the artist laid bare to see, to suffer or enjoy.”

For Mnisi, subject matter and material was secondary to the insatiable desire to produce. “The need to produce, the desire to create, is what moves the artist,” he said. “Some young artists asked me what makes an artist and I said, a decision followed by production. First you have to decide to be and then produce to be. You can attend the best schools of art and be the most talented student, but if you haven’t decided and you can’t produce, you simply won’t be able to.”

The fact that Mnisi passed away in his studio the day after the joyous grand opening of his solo show at Keyes Art Mile, titled Man Of The Hour, is testament to this fact: Mnisi lived for his art, and he loved each and every one of his pieces. “I fall in love with them,” he once said. “And if everyone who sees them falls in love with them, then that will fulfill the purpose of the pieces.”

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