Something new for SA abstract art

The dark clouds that hung over the art world during the pandemic have had some silver linings.

For instance, the old institutional categories have been shaken up a bit and silos broken down. One example lies behind the exhibition that just opened at Aspire Art in Parkwood.

It’s a collaboration between the auctioneer and a new gallery, Studio Nxumalo Contemporary, which was established in 2021.

Founder Musa N Nxumalo tells the FM that the idea behind Studio Nxumalo was to create a platform for young and emerging artists away from the conventional art institutions — the established commercial galleries, curators and arts organisations. 

They have managed seven exhibitions so far, and the latest at Aspire Art is a perfect example of what can happen, not necessarily through a rupture or revolution, but when there’s just enough of a disruption to allow what already exists to create new possibilities.

It allowed Studio Nxumalo and Aspire to navigate the traditionally prickly relationship between the primary art market (which buys new works from a gallery) and the secondary market (which buys art on auction).

Aspire’s Kholisa Thomas says that between auctions, Aspire’s exhibition space lay fallow, so it suited them to hold exhibitions in that spot — which was great for Studio Nxumalo too.  

The exhibition is a two-person show featuring artists Pebofatso Mokoena and Frederick Clarke. Both work, broadly, in abstract art. Despite different cultural backgrounds, Mokoena and Clarke have certain shared interests: music and nature, technology, the cosmos, and finding a sense of freedom in art. 

This suggests a new edge for SA’s abstract art. There was certainly a time when it seemed as if abstract art had lost its teeth. The ability of nonrepresentational art to shock or challenge convention seemed like a distant memory. Some thought that the movement may have run its course.

But looking at Mokoena and Clarke’s work, you discern something quite different. 

There is a meaning buried in the abstraction. This isn’t the 20th-century project of stripping art to its essentials — shape and colour

Perhaps one of the best ways to sum it up is to look at the logo devised for the exhibition title: the word WAV (a reference to multiple ideas, from sound waves and digital sound files to the waves of the pandemic) as it is abstracted to become a zigzag. 

There is meaning buried in the abstraction. This isn’t the 20th-century project of stripping art to its essentials — shape and colour — but about symbols and associations, and how they gather and shed meaning. 

At times, Mokoena speaks about his work in a way that sounds like those 20th-century ideas of abstraction — rhythms and repetitions and composition. But as he speaks, you realise there are a myriad residual meanings, often private references, symbols and other straightforward messages in the work.

The planetary shapes and orbits in his work, for example, is associated with the recent (white) male billionaire’s fetish with private space travel. Everything seems to stand in for something else. There’s even overt political commentary in a work like Ace’s Evil Eye, a swirl of black with a sinister red slit peeping through.  

Similarly, Clarke begins talking in terms colour and shape, but then also, deliberately introduces representation. Some have a clear narrative, but he plays around with lettering, typography, numbers and symbols, and masses them until they lose their ability to convey meaning in the conventional sense. He sometimes also paints over existing canvases, so that there are previous works buried beneath. There is often the sense of lost history: secrets we can’t retrieve.

I suspect it is this tendency towards meaning, or flirtation with content, that is most interesting. It is a brand of abstraction that wants to tell you something. It deals with its own inability to communicate straightforwardly and asserts the frustrated condition of the isolated consciousness. It doesn’t exactly “mean”, but is not simply content to “be” either.  

In bringing these two artists together, WAV demonstrates the type of energy and thought that artists are working through as they engage with abstraction. And what’s exciting is the sense that there are new possibilities for abstraction in contemporary local art. It feels like something new. 

* WAV is on at Aspire Art (32 Bolton Road, Parkwood, Joburg) until April 15  2022