FINE ART: Ivor Powell
BARELY a year ago, painter and collagist Sam=20 Nhlengethwa was being hyped as the future of South=20 African art. His collages, it seemed, fitted into an=20 important cultural project: the reclamation, via the=20 found object, of an authentic urban African experience=20 from the distortions of history.
His latest exhibition, at the Goodman Gallery in Hyde=20 Park, comes as a timely reminder that such fine notions=20 are the property of critics, not of artists.=20
In the face of all the rhetoric that I and other art=20 writers conjured around his earlier work, Nhlengethwa’s=20 new exhibition is one of visual potboilers: pretty,=20 essentially superficial and romanticised impressions of=20 markets and other exotic phenomena in Senegal. They’re=20 nice enough, for the holiday home or breakfast room,=20 but certainly not the stuff that art history is made=20
As a painter, Nhlengethwa has a sensitive, though not=20 particularly dazzling, eye for colour. He deploys, to=20 often telling effect, the modernist technique of using=20 the retinal values of different hues to create form and=20 depth. By this means, he is also capable of generating=20 convincing and pleasing atmospheres and qualities of=20 light and shade.
At the same time, his essentially crude drawing, which=20 leaves figures and architectural elements as stylised=20 monoliths, brings an unexpected gravity to the=20 ephemeral genre of travel painting.=20
But, even the better pieces — which tend to be those=20 without the trademark collage elements — don’t so much=20 as begin to transcend this genre. Ironically, the=20 sources for Nhlengethwa’s latest work (and, by the way,=20 the direction is not new; the artist is returning to=20 styles and subjects essayed before he started working=20 in the township/collage styles) are artists like Trevor=20 Coleman and Irma Stern, as much as, or perhaps more=20 than, Gerard Sekoto.
In short, Nhlengethwa is failing utterly to enter into=20 debates about the colonial and post-colonial worlds; he=20 is merely reproducing the values and sense of the=20 exotic that Europeans and other tourists have brought=20 to the African continent.
On the other hand: so what? These are the kind of=20 issues that interest critics; artists prefer to get on=20 with making art. And maybe one of his paintings would=20 look nice in the breakfast room.