blank is pleased to present Dirge, a body of new paintings by Kamva Matuis.
Kamva Matuis’s painting practice moves seamlessly between depictions of the strange-cinematic, the figurative likeness, the realist scenographic, and the fast-paced crop. Expanding on his sharp dealings with light and shadow, and sustaining his signature somber palette, the artist selectively combines subjects and compositional strategies towards a gloomy articulation of black political and psychic crisis in South Africa.
Dirge extends Matuis’s unexpected image collocations, pushing us to listen across the works, and to hear the mournful orchestration that plays from just behind their surfaces. In post-mortem renderings, colonial symbols, heroic figures, clashing political merch, and contemporary Eastern Cape scenes, Matuis locates and mulls the inescapable presence of death through the dirge — a sad, slow funereal song of, and for, grief.
It is no mistake that in any conversation, Matuis presents his painting process in step with a series of musicians, the late Zim Ngqawana playing over and under his brush, alongside Dyantyis, Makhatini, Mogorosi, and more. Listening closely to Bra Zim’s haunting track Kubi, Asher Gamedze writes on the unhealed wound of the black migrant, a figure suspended in an inescapable and thankless relation between the inhospitable city, the neglected rural hometown, and his own fatigued body: “...his horn-line resolves into a repetitive melodic phrase and the chorus comes in to sing possibly the most deeply saddening, gut-wrenching, hopeless and homeless hook: “Sithwele ubunzima ngoba asihlali apha.” (We are carrying a weight/burden/heaviness because we do not live here.)”
Burial in Mzamomhle, after Courbet is Matuis’s largest work to date, depicting, across three canvases, a funeral scene by way of a large windy tent. The work is positioned by Matuis as arriving “after Courbet”, whose 1849–50 work, Burial at Ornans, shows a regular provincial French funeral in a small town, in epic proportions that were then reserved for History painting or religious art. In Ornans, a gathering of mourners are huddled around a foregrounded open grave site. Much explored for the juxtaposition between its scandalous size and ‘mundane’ subject matter, Ornans is nothing if not a social scene, its melancholy energy containing the diverse throng in slowed animation.
Matuis’s Mzamomhle takes a different strategy, sheltering its crowd under the coated blue polyester of a regular funeral or wedding stretch-tent, which protects the mourners as much from view as it does the gloomy weather. Mzamomhle — translated, with no irony, as “a good attempt” — is Matuis’s home, a township in Burgersdorp in the Eastern Cape, which was, like many townships, formed through sudden displacement. Established in 1987, following forced removal of black people from surrounding ‘white’ farmlands, Matuis describes the place as almost stilled in time, with little hope for change, development, or anything but the reproduction of its engineered poverty and violence.
Matuis’ shielding of the Mzamomhle grievers from view creates space for listening: I look at the folds of the tent and immediately hear the sounds, background activities, and disparate attitudes of the funeral inside. The warmth of singing meets underlying familial tensions, renewed Christian fervour rubs against non-religious frustration, true grief is diluted by the coerced neighbourly payment of respects, and, perhaps, most profoundly, I hear a loud, fervent buzz. It is the chaotic, stressed, improvised re-invention, redistribution, and reorganising of the world that death has us do on our backfoot. Beyond the blue tent, an unknown future, with one less, awaits.
Through this burdened work, Matuis presses the presence of death into and behind all his depicted materials. There is death in the surreal, aspirational image of the late Xhosa King Zwelonke Mpendulo Sigcawu, prayed over by Catholic bishops’ (Iqqhinga Labahedeni), and there is death in the literary prowess and tragedy of the late great K Sello Duiker (Duiker II). There is death in the ANC doek (iQhiya), in the high-heeled funeral-cum-clurb black shoe (Ihomba), and there is death in the alarmed fear in a horse's eye — perhaps this is a work horse, or perhaps it is a show-horse, a pageant animal (Uyandoyika Ungandijongi Nje). There is even death in the artist’s own burgeoning success, and the irresolvable, confused motions it forces between the systemic neglects of home, the systemic excesses that produce arts patronage, and the internalisation of this extreme injustice, which hungers for expression. The artist’s eyes roll back — he is there and there and there, half absent in every site...
In snapshots and wider views, and in Matuis’s dramatic, classical renderings of light, we mourn the particular personality of the failed dream that is post-apartheid, still-apocalyptic South Africa. But Kamva Matuis’s Dirge resolutely refuses numbness or escape, positioning grief as the state of being that allows reckoning with the impossible violence and suffering that still captures black life in the traumatised nation.
Kamva Matuis’s painting practice moves seamlessly between depictions of the strange-cinematic, the figurative likeness, the realist scenographic, and the fast-paced crop. Expanding on his sharp dealings with light and shadow, and sustaining his signature somber palette, the artist selectively combines subjects and compositional strategies towards a gloomy articulation of black political and psychic crisis in South Africa.
Dirge extends Matuis’s unexpected image collocations, pushing us to listen across the works, and to hear the mournful orchestration that plays from just behind their surfaces. In post-mortem renderings, colonial symbols, heroic figures, clashing political merch, and contemporary Eastern Cape scenes, Matuis locates and mulls the inescapable presence of death through the dirge — a sad, slow funereal song of, and for, grief.
It is no mistake that in any conversation, Matuis presents his painting process in step with a series of musicians, the late Zim Ngqawana playing over and under his brush, alongside Dyantyis, Makhatini, Mogorosi, and more. Listening closely to Bra Zim’s haunting track Kubi, Asher Gamedze writes on the unhealed wound of the black migrant, a figure suspended in an inescapable and thankless relation between the inhospitable city, the neglected rural hometown, and his own fatigued body: “...his horn-line resolves into a repetitive melodic phrase and the chorus comes in to sing possibly the most deeply saddening, gut-wrenching, hopeless and homeless hook: “Sithwele ubunzima ngoba asihlali apha.” (We are carrying a weight/burden/heaviness because we do not live here.)”
Burial in Mzamomhle, after Courbet is Matuis’s largest work to date, depicting, across three canvases, a funeral scene by way of a large windy tent. The work is positioned by Matuis as arriving “after Courbet”, whose 1849–50 work, Burial at Ornans, shows a regular provincial French funeral in a small town, in epic proportions that were then reserved for History painting or religious art. In Ornans, a gathering of mourners are huddled around a foregrounded open grave site. Much explored for the juxtaposition between its scandalous size and ‘mundane’ subject matter, Ornans is nothing if not a social scene, its melancholy energy containing the diverse throng in slowed animation.
Matuis’s Mzamomhle takes a different strategy, sheltering its crowd under the coated blue polyester of a regular funeral or wedding stretch-tent, which protects the mourners as much from view as it does the gloomy weather. Mzamomhle — translated, with no irony, as “a good attempt” — is Matuis’s home, a township in Burgersdorp in the Eastern Cape, which was, like many townships, formed through sudden displacement. Established in 1987, following forced removal of black people from surrounding ‘white’ farmlands, Matuis describes the place as almost stilled in time, with little hope for change, development, or anything but the reproduction of its engineered poverty and violence.
Matuis’ shielding of the Mzamomhle grievers from view creates space for listening: I look at the folds of the tent and immediately hear the sounds, background activities, and disparate attitudes of the funeral inside. The warmth of singing meets underlying familial tensions, renewed Christian fervour rubs against non-religious frustration, true grief is diluted by the coerced neighbourly payment of respects, and, perhaps, most profoundly, I hear a loud, fervent buzz. It is the chaotic, stressed, improvised re-invention, redistribution, and reorganising of the world that death has us do on our backfoot. Beyond the blue tent, an unknown future, with one less, awaits.
Through this burdened work, Matuis presses the presence of death into and behind all his depicted materials. There is death in the surreal, aspirational image of the late Xhosa King Zwelonke Mpendulo Sigcawu, prayed over by Catholic bishops’ (Iqqhinga Labahedeni), and there is death in the literary prowess and tragedy of the late great K Sello Duiker (Duiker II). There is death in the ANC doek (iQhiya), in the high-heeled funeral-cum-clurb black shoe (Ihomba), and there is death in the alarmed fear in a horse's eye — perhaps this is a work horse, or perhaps it is a show-horse, a pageant animal (Uyandoyika Ungandijongi Nje). There is even death in the artist’s own burgeoning success, and the irresolvable, confused motions it forces between the systemic neglects of home, the systemic excesses that produce arts patronage, and the internalisation of this extreme injustice, which hungers for expression. The artist’s eyes roll back — he is there and there and there, half absent in every site...
In snapshots and wider views, and in Matuis’s dramatic, classical renderings of light, we mourn the particular personality of the failed dream that is post-apartheid, still-apocalyptic South Africa. But Kamva Matuis’s Dirge resolutely refuses numbness or escape, positioning grief as the state of being that allows reckoning with the impossible violence and suffering that still captures black life in the traumatised nation.
Text by Thulile Gamedze
