Alex Sudheim On show in Durban
As a storyteller, Alson Ntshangase is more of a Dostoevsky than a Wordsworth. His darkly glowing paintings betray the workings of a mind far more interested in the skull beneath than the skin above. “If I start painting a rose I feel I am wasting my paint because I want to say something, not make a pretty picture,” says Ntshangase of his more unsettling works.
The strange, magnetic power of these oil paintings is as harsh as it is lyrical, drawing one in with a mixture of awe and dread. Like Francis Bacon, the Irish born expressionist painter, Ntshangase often chooses a sadistic subject matter to provoke the viewer into confronting the realities of cruelty and violence. In The Alive Monument, one of the more disturbing works currently on show, the painter depicts the bizarre practice of an alive person being placed upside-down in an anthill.
During the time of violence in KwaZulu Natal, this was a peculiarly malicious method used by assassins to entertain themselves and humiliate their victims before executing them.
The visceral intensity of the painting is enhanced by the averted gazes of the helpless family, and the almost comical nature of the man’s legs sticking out of the anthill is in wrenching contrast with the grim reality of his impending death.
Set in tones of dark ochre and burnt sienna and crafted in strong, expressionistic brushstrokes, which intensify the grief and anger on the witnesses’ faces, the work captures the horror of the event with harrowing force.
Most of Ntshangase’s more powerful works derive their strength from the artist’s readiness to confront horror directly, in as unmediated a manner as possible. Yet – as in the brutal Kidnapped Child – there is a profound allegorical intelligence which complements the stark immediacy of the image.
In this work, where Ntshangase deals with muti murders, two sangomas sit around a fire above which the skeleton of a child is suspended by heavy steel hooks and chains. (Hooks and chains abound in Ntshangase’s work, a feature he attributes to his first job at Richard’s Bay harbour after leaving rural Nongoma.)
The painting’s frightening starkness blinds one to its subtle, underlying message. Yet on second glance the red thing hanging from a chain turns out to be a lollipop, the ominous dripping lump a baby’s bottle. The lollipop and bottle symbolise the savage loss of childhood innocence, yet for Ntshangase they also provide a simple, important moral: “Before the violence in KwaZulu Natal most sangomas only used herbs and roots. Now they are using children, and parents must tell their kids not to take sweets from strangers or they will be killed.”
Another work combining disturbing visual intensity with symbolic depth is Truth Commission. The painting depicts a woman with her children on one side of a large, backwards-moving clock, with the skeleton of her dead husband on the other.
While the clock ticks in reverse to reveal the truth of the death of her husband – the spectating skeleton – the woman must continue the struggle to fend for their children. Again, Ntshangase is more concerned with examining the nature of the horror of certain realities to their full extent rather than make them submit to some kind of abstract ideological imperative.
Yet the bleakness of much of Ntshangase’s work is not borne out of some desire to shock or outrage – he is merely telling it like it is: “The truth is there – its no good to shy away from it,” he responds simply when asked if he doesn’t dwell a little too heavily on the dark side.
Alson Ntshangase’s exhibition of oil paintings is at the African Art Centre, Durban, until June 13.
Ntshangase’s frequent use of images of death and brokenness, conveyed through a highly individual, expressionistic style might make the Francis Bacon comparison seem obvious, yet the two artists are strangely connected by similar histories.
Both taught themselves how to paint, (“In the homeland, people don’t have things like this hanging on their walls. I didn’t know you could be an artist by drawing on a board,” says Ntshangase) and both produced their strongest works in response to some kind of major social trauma: World War II opened Bacon’s eyes to the barbaric ravages of violence, while for Ntshangase it was the savage tumult of political conflict in KwaZulu Natal that woke him up to the cruel excesses of human nature.
On that score, several of his other works – such as Umelusi and End of a Hardworking Day – depict a life of rural idyll that poignantly suggest an alternative reality of peace and quiet that could have existed were it not for the sinister forces of evil that stalk the land.
In the context of the exhibition as a whole, these paintings present a bittersweet contrast rather than some kind of pastoral nostalgia for times gone by. Ntshangase exhibits his maturity here by being able to appreciate the tranquility of the country life of his childhood while not being afraid to gaze into the abyss of the darkness that has all but ruined it.