It’s almost an axiom to say South African artist Malcolm Jiyane is a genius, with a versatile range of expression and extraordinary artistic creations.
His mythical caricatured painted scenes and collages of discordant sensibilities, have produced a visceral interpretation of contemporary life, satirically depicted, with a theatricality that emphasises the similitude of everyday life for many in South Africa - a commentary on the mundanity of repetitive mechanical existence.
I first encountered Malcolm’s artwork WINGS, on the cover of Tumi Mogorosi’s trans-expressive musical journey – Sanctum Santorum, a lushly coloured painting depicting a tumultuous yet serenely calm life in momentum, a complex mess of history personal and communal, a form of layering of social realities onto a single plane of perception.
Over time, I began to understand that his craft, nurtured in extraordinarily less-than-auspicious surroundings of Soweto, had been born from seeds sown by various mentors, artists and musicians, blossoming a fertile imagination that would always be in awe of unrestrained life pulsating around him.
In an era when Black artists have had to contend and overcome cynicism and indifference from the art world, while producing works that don’t feel rushed or truncated, Jiyane’s playful yet darkly reflective works continue to feature a variety of materials (realities) plastered on canvas or recycled surfaces, inspiring new glimpses into alternate lives of men and objects.
Enamoured with far-ranging narratives in contention with contemporary representational inaccuracies, tapered with his own dystopian reinterpretations, the images are imbued with uncertainties about life itself, a grappling with paradoxes of black experiences in an anti-black world.
And it no surprise that his art seems influenced by many styles that resonate with today’s temperament, deciphering codes of past symbols and encrypting them onto new tapestries, visual concoctions that channel vast cultures and their mysteries in a beguiling way.
With a deliciously dark panache, mysteriously sensitive to ideas of “home”, a confining space which nevertheless liberates, Jiyane connects the mythological importance of such spaces with depictions of those who find shelter in whatever crude formations (shack architecture) of derelict squatter camps.
Far removed from fleeting trends of contemporary artistic articulation of beauty in squalor, his is a form of reminiscence, embalming of gutter existence, enroute to a dynamic realm which liberates blackness from the anathematic to the cosmic.
Spirited away, head-spun in euphoria at his latest collection of works, I find myself contemplating how he seems to have mastered pre-verbal modes of transmitting feelings, exploring the mundane through art, bringing essences to the fore, peeling an onion of a tear jerking disaster country.
The spirit of these places, locations, far removed from the tangible, but caving in on the liminal and in-sensorial, are themes that permeate his craft even through music, where he often fuses disparate sonic traditions into a cacophony of new soundscapes.
His is an art that is constantly scrutinising the lived experiences of blackness in South Africa, blackness as an endangered state of being, precariously lingering between imminent death or continued strife and disgrace.
Despite his experimental nature, self-transforming and self-displacing these lived experiences are not wasted against bourgeoisie obsession with the vulgar in black lives if his artworks’ contents are misunderstood, it might be because of an innate urge to elude compartmentization, classification in terms of art as product of commerce.
Prohibitively and radically resistant to quick analysis, his art is always devoted to the comical gallery of life, scrutinising his own experiences with those of his community, his kin, neighbours and even time, past, presented for a future.
What is reality but a multiplicity?
And this recurring theme ultimately speaks of art as reminder of all that remains, and by making fluid connection with his past, he is jolting us in the present towards thinking vividly about an unknown/hidden/ignored dimensions of the human experience.
Fragmented relationships with the past woven into his growing oeuvre of transcendental imagery foreshadow a deteriorating world, filled with misconceived stories that make human existence worth the novel adventure it purports to be.
And actually, as is visible in the prescient analogies ever present in Malcolm’s art, our present societal dementia is thematic and inevitable, with blurred visions of possible futures populating his canvases.
My quizzical enchantment with his art stems from an obsession with enmeshed and entangled narratives that are driven by something dream-like, a somnambulism of sort, where the artist is but a medium in a much greater séance with other alternate variables.
Where mind and body are automatons for a masterful purpose, improvisational observers from the vantage point of both creator and his creation merged and framed in a spectacle on frozen time.
Images by: The Artist
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