Alex Sudheim
fine art
Trevor Makhoba is no stranger to controversy. He has an uncanny knack for disinterring some of the more uncomfortable impulses squirming beneath South African society’s skin. This is all over his show Rebound, currently at Durban’s NSA Gallery.
Like a surgeon cutting into flesh to remove a subcutaneous cyst or a therapist hypnotising a patient to tap dreadful desires, Makhoba occupies himself with subjects on the sinister end of the social spectrum.
Possibly his most notorious work features a typical suburban scene with a white madam dishing out instructions to a sweating black man working in her garden. Quotidian enough, but Makhoba depicts the woman in a grotesquely sexual state, crouching down by the gardener, dress riding over her thighs to display her white panties, gin-and-tonic in her hand and tipsy, lustful smirk on her face.
A simple yet devastating evisceration of the unspoken racial and sexual undercurrents contorting the straight face South Africa so often tries to keep.
In his new work, Makhoba continues to cast a trenchant eye upon the everyday incongruities and taboos which pervade contemporary life in this country. Rebound, his first solo show since he won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award in 1996, is Makhoba’s way of saying he’s back on the scene and still pulling no punches.
His ability to both disturb and wryly amuse is most evident in the new painting Bad Nanny, where Makhoba depicts a group of enthralled black kids clustered before an enormous television screen upon which a naked white couple copulate.
Bad Nanny is both a sardonic critique of the overwhelming role played by television in children’s lives and an embodiment of one of his typically idiosyncratic observations: “You only ever see white people having sex on TV.”
He refers to television as “that poisonous thing” that “destroys the character” of young children. Yet, despite the moral implications of the painting, it is his morbid fascination with the ghoulish trance of excitement the children are held in that generates the work’s power.
As is the case with most good satire, it has an element of anger which is the vehicle for the acid-laced humour. Another compelling contrast in the self-taught painter’s work is that between navet and sophistication. Makhoba’s painting technique may be stark and simple, but this only serves to enhance the strong narrative component of his work.
Rebound is on at the NSAGallery, 166 Bulwer Road, Glenwood, Durban. For more information Tel: (031) 202?2293