Moshekwa Langa
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?