Of Such a Kind. To Paint is to Attempt

Kareem attempts to give language to doubt, guilt and inner turmoil. Howie offers an attempt at human connection. Mbolekwa attempts to craft notions of self that sufficiently hold the dissonances and contradictions of his personal experiences. Each works towards what is often described by scholars of the philosophy of mind as qualia - the distinctive and inherent feeling of a sensation… a way to try and explain what it is like.

Through painting, they seek visual sensations to show a feeling: that it is of such a kind. They share inner experiences in physical terms: a hand tightly grasping a sheet, a head thrashing side to side, a lone figure perched with one knee drawn to the chest - every case attempting to communicate a particular condition.

Through his dizzying representations of faces, heads and busts, Kareem uses multiplicity and exaggeration to reveal the emotional tonalities of distress and unease. His charcoal work of radical minimalism and monochromatic tone reflects a kinetic quality that reminds us of the body’s ability to move, dance, labour and to suffer. The work suggests a kind of vulnerability, about which he reflects: “I think I am losing my empathetic self and I’m realising I wasn’t prepared for that.”

Where Kareem's figures are unstable and shapeshifting, Howie’s figures are dead still. For Howie, painting is an expression of the longing for connection through self-portraits that evoke sensory perceptions of touch, sight and even pain. The figure’s gaze is always averted, drawing a parallel to the contradictory nature of wanting to feel seen without wanting to be looked at. Together, the averted gaze and the various postures - sometimes rendered as fragments - remind us that what is visible on the surface can at times hint at what has gathered inside the body.

Between the two states of motion and stillness in Kareem and Howie’s paintings, Mbolekwa’s figures are suspended mid-motion. They hover in the expanse of imagined landscapes, some of which swirl in light and shadow (see Umbra). Working with oil paint and earth, Mbolekwa draws the palpable experience of material onto the canvas: earth as skin, as body, as land, as flesh. For him, the attempt is towards a poetry that contains the multitudes of his experience of blackness, within, outside of and beyond representation. Place and dislocation meet in the soil collected from his home, rigorously worked into the canvas through vague shapes that resemble maps and memories of the small village of Macacuma in the north-eastern corner of the Eastern Cape.

Across the show, the body appears both as the human figure and as marks tracing the earth as a living organism. The body allows for reflection and interpretation while also serving as a point of contact with the rest of the world. To echo Malin Hedlin Hayden, an Associate Professor in the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University, who, writing on the work of British sculptor Antony Gormley, asks: “What is the body a place for?” Through this exhibition, we might answer that the body is a place where interiority meets the world. And if we ask further: “What is painting for?”, we might answer that painting is an attempt to portray to others the light and the darkness within.

Like Montaigne’s essays, Of Such a Kind. To Paint is to Attempt reflects various forms of attempts - at visualising internal worlds, at communicating emotion, at crafting notions of self and at understanding the exterior world through shared realities.

Text by Nkgopoleng Moloi