In the three works by renowned artist Ephraim Mojalefa Ngatane, born in Maseru and maturing in metropolis of Johannesburg, I observe an intricate connection and intergenerational dialogue between his works and the art of Taung born, Lesego Moncho.
The famine and maternal are the energies that radiate from each work by these South Africa’s unsung artists, whose art gestures vulnerability and resilient beauty often cluttered among the debris of broken identities and social memory.
Through an evolving visual language shaped by abstraction, intuition and interplay of materials, Ngatane’s critical strokes of expression embrace a subversion of the spectacle of poverty towards a record of resilient travail against politically prescribed fate.
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Lesego on the other hand, as a contemporary galleries and artist, continues to evolve his style, as his works feature have grown to feature urban and non-urban identities weaved through curvatures and geometric compositions mingling strokes of acrylics and oils.
His work possesses a darkly playfulness of colour and lines, rectangular and squared forms that mimic daily expression against the backdrop of the clutter of township life.
The township skylines, the cramped compactness of squatter camps insinuated as canvases within the canvas where beings struggle with life’s joys and perils.
Obscured and unsettling faces always seem in awe of their environment, merged with bursting colours of township squaller, carrying instinctive meanings of perhaps how these unknown and unidentified black bodies survive unknowability and obscurity.
This obscuration of their faces, these potently elemental figures frozen in time, becomes a method of questioning ones recognition of what is familiar, yet rousing nostalgia carried like fragments of a people’s memory along a journey towards dreams.
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With Ngatane’s probing studies of an “end of civilisation”, in his work, bodies also exist in a state of continued search for identity in world that constantly ascribes categories to all forms of being.
Wrapped in a sense of multiplicity, these figures are captured often in groupings that symbolise non-alone(ness), a phenomenon prevalent in black community life.
And this communality in strife and celebration, fixed in alchemical colour palates, Ngatane’s paintings, reminds us that light and colour are siblings vibrating in harmony to surges of consciousness.
Each painting observed seems to lodge something into minds of the beholders, causing a pause, and interval of contemplation.
Not a fleeting glance, but a gaze that leans into unspoken gestures and small declarations.
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These selected pieces together question whether there are some entanglements with the politics of dispossession as experienced by people of colour, that still haunts our distraught national conscience?
I answer in the affirmative, having interviewed Lesego about his inspirations and allegiance to documentary style abstraction, where the forms are cleaved form actual persons or found photographs and images discovered through research.
These artworks works invite viewers to probe the invisible within the recognisable, the reasons that emerge independently are in eternal conversation with the viewer’s own past experiences of the poverty of township life.
As the country grapples with gender-based violence and its states of conflict and violence on the female body, these works mark a departure from struggles for bodily agency and self-determination to a collective awareness of “not being alone is our sorrows”.
Through these works, Ngatane barters with lived and imagined experiences between his present and possible yet manifest future.
Lesego confirms that no much has changed in regards to the dispossession and incarcerational designs of black communal experiences.
And while both their art positions gender as an embodied field of erasure, unseen yet revealed as recurring historical crises, there is a celebration of resilience attributed to the maternal guardians of an impoverished people.
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Images sourced online.
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