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Untitled [Man in hat]
Moshekwa Langa
Artwork 1998/2002
Artwork: Moshekwa Langa, Untitled [Man in hat] (1998/2002). Mixed media on paper. 137.4 x 99.3 cm. Private collection.
Artist Moshekwa Langa Title Untitled [Man in hat] Date 1998/2002 Materials Mixed media on paper Dimensions 137.4 x 99.3 cm Credit Private collection

Untitled (Man in hat) counts itself among Langa’s few figurative paintings. The artist works against interpretation, obscuring the image even as he paints it. The man with the red hat is rendered opaque, anonymous and nameless. The white line across the figure’s face reads as a cancellation, as a portrait struck-through. But then, the artist has never been preoccupied with clarity, preferring instead an associative and suggestive engagement with his work. The strike-through is as much a denial of legibility as it is of the painted subject. This resistance is not unfamiliar to the artist’s work. Langa, the critic Ashraf Jamal suggests, “cannot accept resolution of any kind, that his bloodwork, his psychic wiring, militates always against composure, stillness, harmony, truth, and the many other beatitudes we assign to works which we suppose consoling and good for us.”

b.1975, Bakenberg

Asked for an adjective to describe his practice, Moshekwa Langa replies with fugitive. In medium, his work is disparate; in sensibility, inconstant and changeable. He moves across such mediums as installation, drawing, video and sculpture with easy fluency, his materials as various as string, paper bags, oil paint, words, photographs, and found images. Like an anthropologist recording his surroundings in obscure maps, Langa’s practice is an exercise in visual note-taking. It is perhaps fugitive in that the artist’s attention is transitory, each work an index of a moment soon passed. In a text accompanying the exhibition Ellipsis (2016), the artist’s wandering mind is made evident: “Something broke in the description,” he writes, “and I am just leaving it here for the moment and I will open another topic because I am talking about many different things… There is a break because I get distracted – maybe it was sunny and then it started raining, and then suddenly, I do not know, something else happened.” His work is a gesture of time-keeping, a record of things come and gone. Langa’s maps may be illegible, unfinished, without compass, but they pose a curious visual question: how might one transcribe a life in all its routine complexity?

Somebody, nobody, no body
Lucienne Bestall

The present and implied figure in A4's inventory of artworks. – January 24, 2025

Path page
Somebody, nobody, no body
Lucienne Bestall
The present and implied figure in A4’s inventory of artworks. – January 24, 2025
Path page

A place to start: with personhood, with the most direct impression.

Indexical in medium, the figure named, their likeness legible.

David Goldblatt's black-and-white photograph 'Ephraim Zulu watering his garden, 179 Central Western Jabavu, Soweto. September' shows a man seated on a chair in a yard, holding a hosepipe. In the background is a dog and a woman.
Lindokuhle Sobekwa's photograph 'Zenandi' shows a child sitting on an outcropping of rock on a grassy hill.

A more oblique example of the same mode –

Artwork photograph that shows George Hallett’s framed monochrome photographic diptych ‘Peter Clarke’s Tongue’, from the Customs exhibition in A4’s Gallery, mounted on a white wall.

Another at the edge of effacement –

Artwork photograph that shows Dor Guez’s photographic print ‘Samira’ from the Customs exhibition in A4’s Gallery.

Then:

A less direct form, but still a resemblance. The sitters named, resolutely themselves. (Arranged in degrees of clarity: Dora Sowden, Terrence and Mom).

Things begin to slip.

Here, a name and the word 'portrait'. Portrait of Julia. But no likeness to speak of. Instead – gestures, thickness, muddy opacity.

Named again, an image of a historical figure denied by a child's eclipsing crayon.

There are others without overture to personhood, similarly obscured (struck through by whiteness or hidden beneath spreading blackness).

Still another, rendered faceless by fire.

Even the photographed figure at times resists the medium's ambitions to precisely transcribe their likeness, becoming ghostly and indistinct, given without name.

Or appearing as a portrait of absence –

Sabelo Mlangeni’s ‘Absence of Identities’, a black and white photograph that depicts the shadowed faces of a bride and groom.

There are then those figures that remain hidden, are disguised beneath cloth or bound in hazard tape. All betray the individual (or deity) beneath – in title or image.

A photograph of Christo's collotype print and collage 'Wrapped monument to Leonardo, Project for the Piazza Della Scala, Milan'.

Others are wholly absent, recalled in only the empty vessels of clothing: hats without heads, sleeves without limbs. Where some remember named individuals, others evoke anonymous figures.

Jo Ractliffe's monochrome photograph print 'Roadside stall on the way to Viana, from the series 'Terreno Ocupado'.
An installation photograph of Haroon Gunn-Salie and James Mathews' installation 'Amongst Men' shows casts of kufiyas suspended from the ceiling.
A photograph of Kevin Beasley's untitled resin, garment and umbrella sculpture standing on a concrete floor.

Present in degrees of likeness, or hidden, erased, obscured and absent – the body that is somebody and the body that is no body. There are others.

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