Neferuda Art

Once I came across the prints of works by a well-known South African artist Nandipha Jantjies, I could not be nothing more than intrigued to a point of reflecting on the works I saw both a mirror of my personal inner femininity, or perhaps a mirror of all womanises in all.

An art practice that defies categorisation, speaking an unusual language of forms with a remarkable versatility of imaginative encounters, illuminating on scenarios of counter-expression from disobedient terrains that confound commercialisation.

There are poetics of dance embodied in movements of her figures, who seem captivated and captured at moments of some euphoric self-realisations or valuation, choreographed for sensorial reception through sight, the aural and the smells of sweating skin seeping as though the artworks were portraits of the artist herself. 

Through random selection of available images of Nandipha’s works, I have selected for this note transcends blanket categorisation and feels as though it is meant to orient viewers to some invisible and unspoken, and the complexities of intertwined experiences and memories thereof.

Tokoloho is yet another intriguing piece which interprets freedom through blackness, locating and fixing the viewer’s gaze, inviting them to pause and reflect and expand their scope of surveying these bodies in their denuded exuberance, without severing or restricting them from their identities.

Her uncanny depictions of women with a cubist streak, evoking new curiosity that refuse to conform to the viewers’ expectations, are a reflection of the resistant energy her figures exhibit both as personalities and symbols of collective femininity.

Geometrically severed faces and limps, heads adorned with stars, chests pimpled with markings similar to astrological mappings; others captured in provocative poses that point to “injuries” or elements of discontent in the physic of these figures - what are these figures voicing? 

Disfigurement looking similar to jewellery, as a form of ornamentation reminiscent of many sculpted African figurines, these images are a beauty that embrace and reverse urban myths around feminine vulnerability. 

Neferuda’s (as Nandipha often signs her artworks) figures are magnanimous on paper or canvases, and while subverting the male gaze various misguided myths are revisited with a crispness that nevertheless embodies uncensored pride in the often commodified female body. 

Horned and domineering, Nandipha’s allusions to maternal nurture are in themselves inner geographies of personal imaginative inquiries into the idea of connections with nature that is still cradled in humanity inner reservoirs, while similarly lamenting that loss.

Ambiguously positioned between practices that range from printmaking, painting and digital printing, Neferuda’s art elucidates on way of perceiving womanhood and similarly questions these processes of perception and observation in the greater arena of identity construction in the face of mass objectification of the female body. 

And from this vantage point, her is an art that stands outside norms of palatable representation of womanhood beyond racial perimeters, isolated yet all encompassing and embracing a plethora of definitions constructed or ritualised, but also fluid just as the curves on her robust bodies. 

Images from The Artist's Social Media Pages