ART: Julia Teale
THE paintings of Trevor Makhoba, Standard Bank Young Artist award-winner for 1996, display an unusual intensity of vision and execution. There is no doubt that Makhoba is an accomplished painter, with a sophisticated understanding of both the psychological and aesthetic potential of colour. In this regard, the paintings are often seductive, drawing the viewer into carefully plotted scenarios. But it is clear that pleasuring the viewer with aesthetically pleasing, Utopian images is not what drives this artist’s work.
Makhoba’s themes are clearly centred around an ardent belief that urban, Westernised South African culture is endangering the values and morality rooted in black rural traditions. His subject matter is divided into two distinct parts – that which valorises traditional societies, and that which forms a highly critical commentary of urban life.
But it is in the works that directly address urbanised society that Makhoba’s works gain a dark humour and bitter edge that leave no doubt in the viewer’s mind that this artist has an axe to grind, particularly with the sexual deviances that he seems to find confined in this context. In It’s Dad, Mum, a young girl shamefacedly reveals her pregnancy to her shocked mother – the image works in a combination of the sugar-sweet, childish colours of a child’s room and pyjamas – and a dark humour that animates the face of a toy bear to express her father’s salaciousness and a complete lack of remorse. The safety of the childhood home is a myth for this little girl and her innocence is irretrievably lost.
A Hard Blow in Beijing, which refers to the 1995 World Conference for Women, clearly reveals Makhoba’s view that it is the erosion of a patriarchal system and the concomitant emasculation of the black male that results in the corruption of sound societal values. The image is of a boxing ring. A triumphant, topless black woman looms over the powerful, but recumbent black male while a topless white woman squats beside him and counts.
Makhoba clearly lays the blame for the ills of black urbanised society at the feet of permissive, white Western mores, and the work as a whole is pervaded with a strident sexism and racism that fails to be mediated or softened by any mitigating signs. His paintings often have a kind of heavy-handed humour to them, but the humour is just another means to hone his message, and has a bitter edge, seen particularly in Great Temptation in the Garden, A Hard Blow in Beijing and It’s Dad, Mom. Viewed on its own Great Temptation in the Garden is a witty and hard-hitting comment on the corrupted communication between people as a result of the social engineering that epitomised apartheid. But read in conjunction with the rest of the works on the show, the statement becomes less ironic and more stridently bitter.
But finally, what is really irksome about this exhibition is the catalogue commentary written by fellow artist and friend, Paul Sebisi, who bends over backwards to deny the sexist and racist overtones of the work .
Sebisi’s commentary, by virtue of its tiresome attempt to make Makhoba into ”everybody’s man”, becomes a kind of apology for the content of the work. Makhoba is an artist of excellence, his views are there to be interrogated, debated, questioned – this is to be valued, not denied.
The exhibition is on at the Irma Stern gallery in Cape Town