It is often easy to surmise that an artist’s creative process is comprised of rigid routines and methodological analyses of materials for the production of art for its own sake, but I find the opposite is often the case, when observing how Buhle Nkalashe goes about creating his mesmeric diaphanous artworks.
A certain frolicking spirit imbues his mixed media paintings with a somberly contemplative, yet empathetic gaze at subjects he attempts to capture, and this sincerity in interpretation is often what contemporary lack.
An impoverishment of empathy, as characteristic of pompous postures commonly associated with artists is absent in this young artist, who still considers his rural upbringing a virtue that empowers his complex view of the world and humanity in general.
His craft seems a playful engagement with matter in the material sense, as well as matters close to political climes of a turbulently bourgeoning nation facing a multi-layered future drawn from a tormented and suffocating past.
As with the two artworks in his Suffocation Series, I am struck not only by the artist’s treatment of ephemeral materiality of his objects to foreground sinister realities experienced in the present by many a black people.
The idea of suffocation can be viewed literally but as his artworks slip conventional classification by drawing form varied established disciplines while constantly remaining in aesthetic pursuit of a new, an immersive entanglement with materials, their reassembly on each canvas and the paradoxes and tempered perspective they arouse, give the paintings a haunting air of a silent witness.
Jests of flamboyant colors creeping about an outline of a head on undefined shoulders from darkly hued blues and earthen gold enveloping hidden faces, solely eyes, sightlessly communicating a strangled impression of isolation and helplessness.
This unenviable pain and breathlessness written on masked expressions is a true metaphor of our times of suffocated imaginations, with emboldened outlines, a form of borders, disallowing fluidity between the subject and their environment.
Figures emerging coherently with serenity that alternates with uncertainty, steady gazes already assailed by dire intimations of rejection hence their veiled appearances, perhaps.
Nkalashe’s art is not merely tangential, but an art that modifies beyond definitional concerns of multi-disciplinarity, those liminal connections between all disciplines mixed into a singular medium of expression.
He creates work that dares reimagine realities, emotions and premonitions within a temporal sphere of the contemporary, giving a body presence to each event and emotion espoused by each piece.
I unsteadily assume that these pieces were produced as a lens through which to view broader issues of isolation and trauma in social and political contexts, but that is merely an interpretative stance from an observer’s vantage point.
But, trusting that more invigorating work is yet to be birthed by Nkalashe’s curiosities, we can always look forward to uncanny reconfigurations of the everyday and its pulsating characters.
Find more artworks at
www.buhlenkalashe.co.za
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